[DEggers]

Hi, I’m Dwight.  I got turned on to monitoring my home energy by reading Saul Griffith’s Electrify book.  He makes reference to the Sense monitor, which is where I started.  After three weeks I realized that its machine learning approach to splitting out loads is way over hyped so returned it for a full refund.  During that period I had become aware of Emporia Vue which seemed much more direct, at half the price.  I’m in my third day of usage and still fine tuning my installation.  I started looking at incorporating the plug monitors to increase granularity of multi-load circuits and realized that many have also struggled with this, which is what lead me to the Community.  I’m very impressed so far with the product, the company, and this forum.

I am kind of a data nerd so I am looking forward to accumulating enough history to start analyzing the data in Excel.

Another motivation is that I am taking the lead at our church in defining the specs for a PV system.  As a commercial customer most of our electric service cost is based on peak demand.  To get treatment similar to a residential customer — paying only for energy consumption — we need to keep our load, averaged over a 30-minute window, below 15 kW over the entire year.  For a n economic efficient PV installation, we expect to need a peak shaving approach — incorporating batteries to supplement when our usage exceeds this limit and the PV is not up to speed early in the day.  I want to use a Vue monitor to do a thorough investigation of all of our energy loads through a summer of high A/C demand so that we can optimally size our PV/battery mix.  I would be very interested in anyone else’s experience along these lines.  Our local PV contractors don’t seem to have much experience in this area, but we are too small a fish to attract the interest of a PV contractor that does larger projects optimized in this way.

Our service provider is currently introducing residential smart metering and we are not being forced into time-of-day metering.  I expect that is coming soon, so I can foresee the day when battery storage would also be economically efficient for my home needs.  The detail and duration of the Vue coverage will be useful when that time comes.  I have 12 years of history with PV on my home, which is one of the most satisfying decisions I ever made.

I look forward to learning more from the participants on this forum and hope that I can also contribute something useful.

[DEggers]

I probably have the same question.  My situation is that I have a 20-amp breaker that powers a gas furnace and outlets for a freezer and wine cooler.  I would like to see their loads differentiated in the app.  Can I accomplish this by using the Emporia plug monitors on the freezer and wine cooler?

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