Home Solar Monitoring & Apps A Closer Look at Emporia Smart Home Energy Monitor

A Closer Look at Emporia Smart Home Energy Monitor

by Know it All Solar Team
A Closer Look at Emporia Smart Home Energy Monitor

Emporia is a company in Littleton, Colorado, founded by a team of developers, designers and engineers, and self-proclaimed energy geeks committed to providing energy monitoring to save energy and be environmentally responsible. Emporio helps to create a cleaner and more beautiful planet. The goal is to save customers money by making their homes smarter and energy-efficient.

Emporia’s product line consists of energy monitors, smart plugs, energy management software, EV chargers, and home batteries. The energy management software is the core of their solution; it allows Emporia to configure the physical products and connect them to the internet to control and monitor your electrical system through the web & mobile app. In other words, Emporia’s solution is an energy monitoring system connected to the internet, monitoring electricity consumption. 

Emporia Gen 2 Vue Energy Monitor

Emporia Gen 2 Vue Energy MonitorThe benefit of the Emporio Gen 2 Vue Energy Monitor is that it requires minimal to no changes to your existing electrical wiring. It is not intrusive to the existing electrical system thus well suited for retrofit installations. It will fit very nicely in your electrical panel and is scalable from single-phase to three-phase electrical systems, allowing you to monitor homes & businesses of any size and complexity. 

Current Clamps & Configuring your Emporia Energy Monitoring

Emporia energy monitor has current clamps between 5 A and 200 A, which can be attached around your electric cables, allowing you to measure different devices. The advantage is that each device is connected and tagged accordingly, thereby noting very clearly which device is consuming what amount of electricity at what time of the day. The configuration might change from one house to the other, and your configuration depends entirely on how this installation is done. For more complex electrical systems or larger cables requiring bigger or higher amperage clamps, Emporia also provides a flexible clamp that can be applied around larger electrical cables.

Alpha-ESS, EV Charger & Vue Utility Connect

In addition to the Emporia monitoring systems, which are applicable for residential and commercial solutions through various combinations and numbers of clamps; the Emporia product range includes Alpha-ESS home battery system, EV charger, Vue Utility Connect – a utility monitor connected through a device that pairs with a Zigbee enabled smart meter – and smart plugs.

How to Create your Custom Emporia Energy Monitoring Solution

What can Emporia’s energy monitoring solution do for you? The answer to this question lies with the actions you need to take to improve the electricity consumption at home. First, calculate the lowest cost of electricity you can achieve; 

  1. By assessing the various utility rate plans available to you,
  2. The amount of electricity generated from solar,
  3. The ESS battery storage capacity,

and the related costs of purchasing and installing these systems. Second, Emporia energy monitors how much electricity from solar you are generating at any given time, which devices are consuming electricity and how much electricity you are supplying back to the grid. This visualization provides how much solar is being self-consumed and how much is net metering and sequences them over a timeline. By better understanding when you’re consuming your electricity and when you are generating the electricity, you will be able to match the amount of energy generation with the energy consumption. 

It is left up to the engineer and the homeowner’s imagination to decide how the Gen 2 Vue energy monitoring system works. The solution allows for several combinations designed specifically for your requirement. This means that if your need is a simple single-phase solution that connects to a couple of devices, you would still be able to benefit from this device. And at the same time, a large commercial operation with several devices across a wider area and connecting to higher voltage electrical systems can also be monitored through Emporia’s platform, which allows you to scale as required.

Having said this, it is pretty strange that the Emporia energy management system does not have a smart home integration with Amazon, Google Assistant, or SmartThings, for example. Of course, it is entirely plausible that this facilitation will be available in future versions, but at the moment, it does seem glaringly absent.

Using Emporia Smart Home Energy Management

Smart Home Energy ManagementIn some locations, the net metering policies or utility rate plans are such that you would be better off not supplying your surplus electricity to the grid. If that is the case, the Emporio Gen 2 Vue Energy Monitor solution helps you to consume the electricity directly by turning on the devices at the right time while solar is generating power, and there is surplus electricity. In addition, the smart plug integration allows you to turn on/ turn off appliances in conjunction with surplus or lower generation of electricity. With the thermostats that work with the Gen 2 Vue Energy Monitor, you are also able to control the temperature of the air-conditioning system in such a manner that the home remains comfortable, but you could turn down or turn up the temperature of your HVAC while your home or business is less occupied.

By connecting the clamps to individual appliance’s electric cables, you can recognize which particular appliance is running at any given time. This means, for example, you would understand if your oven or your water heater is running at a time that is not essential. If you were able to put a dollar figure to this value, you would have an understanding of how much of your electricity is being consumed by which particular appliance. The mobile app shows devices that have been consuming energy or running for longer than generally applicable. You could intervene by switching it off or be alerted to overuse during times of inoccupancy. Knowing when to store electricity and consume electricity is also of great advantage. 

We will add one more factor here, the electricity required for your electric vehicle. To be genuinely green, you would need the source of your electricity to be a renewable energy source, essentially, your solar system. But how would you be able to control that the electricity generated by the solar system is the actual electricity used to charge your electric vehicle? The Emporia Smart Home Energy Management system allows you to do that. The configuration would prioritize electric vehicle charging only if the electricity generated by solar is more than the electricity consumed by your home. 

The same principle is also applicable for charging the energy storage system, wherein, the battery is charged by prioritizing electricity from your solar. Energy storage is also prioritized over the electricity fed back into the grid. This is possible because the Emporia energy monitor can determine how much electricity is flowing in which direction and, therefore, control devices connected to the energy monitoring system to activate and re-configure the flow of electricity favorably to your needs. 

If you are in a time-of-use rate plan, you will benefit from switching off devices during peak times, storing access electricity during off-peak rates, and prioritizing electricity from the stored battery. Suppose your net metering rate plan allows you to benefit from exporting during the peak rates. In that case, you can store surplus electricity from solar and the electricity grid during off-peak rates and supply it to the grid during peak hours. This is the basics of what is known as energy arbitrage, wherein, you are storing the electricity that is cheap and exporting when the electricity is expensive. 

Emporia V2X Solution

Emporia’s solution would benefit businesses and homes without solar panels looking for energy management because solar panels are not a prerequisite for Emporia’s energy monitoring solution. In addition, the V2X charging system, which is yet to be launched, would be something to look forward to as it will be a game-changer. It will allow you to store excess electricity from your solar or the electricity grid, during off-peak rates, in your electric vehicle’s battery. And use the electric vehicle’s battery as a source of electricity to power your home during peak rates or grid outages. Even the smallest electric vehicle battery pack is over 30 kilowatt-hours, capable of comfortably powering your home for a day or two. If your typical vehicle usage is for daily commuting, you are likely to have spare battery capacity that you could benefit from with Emporia’s V2X solution. 

In Summation

The Emporia energy management system is vital for your home or business. While the energy monitoring system is not remarkably different from any other device, it is a dependable solution that can apply to several requirements. As mentioned before, the lack of integration with other smart home & automation systems seems odd but perhaps not detrimental to its function. Emporia’s solution is exemplary, and as such, they are one of the few companies that offer energy storage systems and EV chargers as part of their energy monitoring solutions. In conclusion, while Emporia isn’t groundbreakingly different as a solution, it can certainly be relied upon to deliver on your energy monitoring, management, and conservation requirements. Thereby, delivering on the Founders’ commitment to a cleaner and more beautiful planet.

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