Any way to disable switching in smart plugs?

[Eric777]

I have a Vue, but I used up 12 of the 16 CTs on 240V circuits, leaving me with just 4 for the remaining 120V circuits.

Using smart plugs could help in that I don’t need to use up one of the remaining CTs on something that just plugs into a normal outlet.  But ‘I would like to monitor things like the refrigerator, but the smart plugs don’t seem to be able to reliably handle power outages (i.e. if the power comes back on, you have to manually use the app to restore power to the fridge).  This is far from ideal.

I found the thread where someone soldered a jumper to accomplish this.  I was wondering if there was a less hackish way of accomplishing the same thing.

[yyzguy]

I have smartplugs on a freezer and a refrigerator and haven’t had any issues after two power outages

[Germerican]

Hi Eric,

I have a similar situation and found the following workaround: set multiple ON events in your schedule for the smartplug. E.g. if you set up hourly ON events (that would be 24 events), after a power outage your fridge will be ON again after max 1h, which should be fine for most fridges/freezers. (Don’t set any OFF events, but that should be self-explanatory…)

I hope that helps!

 

[emporiacs]

Thank you all for the feedback and sharing your experiences. We’ve relayed it to the team.

[emporiacs]

Hi, we noticed this thread and some additional thoughts for you and future visitors below:

If you have a balanced 240V circuit, you can monitor it using only 1 x 50A CT. Solar lines and EV Charger lines, are always balanced.

If you don’t know if the line is balanced, you can make your own tests by adding one 50A CT per leg, turning the appliance on and watching on the app during the whole cycle of the appliance how much both phases are pulling.

We do not recommend using multipliers on sub-panel breakers since this can over/understate the circuit usage as sub-panel circuits are not symmetrical (balanced) in their load.

More information: https://help.emporiaenergy.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408547870871-CT-Sensors-Monitoring-Dual-Pole-Multi-Pole-Circuits-and-using-Multipliers

[Author]

Posts