Vue Utility Connect in Condo Building

[peterxian]

Last week I purchased the Vue Utility Connect (USB dongle) and registered it with SoCal Edison (SCE). In my condo building, our power meters are all located in the parking garage, where there also happens to be community WiFi coverage. I was able to plug the Vue in an unused receptacle in the garage about 60 feet from my meter, which has connectivity to both my meter and the community WiFi.

Registration of the device with SCE was simple, and completely online. I registered on Friday and by Tuesday morning the “link” light showed connectivity to my meter and data appeared in the app. Note I do not use the community WiFi at home, but since the device uses cloud storage I am able to access the data from my private WiFi and elsewhere.

My opinion of the app is that it’s ok, but could use some UX improvements. It may be good for quick checks or long-term summaries but it is difficult for viewing hours/day-long high-resolution data, since scrolling the graphs constantly rescales the y-axis and I can’t zoom the x-axis to see more data at once. It would also be nice if the app had more information from the device itself, such as logs, for troubleshooting.

Instead, I’m using a local solution. I’ve been a Home Assistant user for almost two years, running the HA docker container alongside InfluxDB and Chronograf — so I love collecting and analyzing data. The HACS installation of the Emporia Vue integration was straightforward and is working perfectly. While I haven’t setup any “gee whiz” home automatons with power data yet (coming soon), I’ve had a Chronograf dashboard open all week to view gorgeous and scalable graphs of detailed wattage utilization, making it easy to find and analyze what’s happening in the house.

I strongly considered installing a Vue 2 in my home’s power panel — it’s a great piece of hardware — but opted for the utility connect mostly because of cost (SCE is refunding more than half the $40 purchase price on my next bill) and because I wasn’t convinced I needed the granularity of individual circuits yet, or comfortable with per-circuit data being stored in the cloud (I’d prefer to log it directly to my local server, which is not an option yet). Now I’m seeing the same data SCE sees, in realtime, which is fine for cloud storage, at a price almost too hard to turn down. Highly recommended, and happy to answer any questions.

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