Power / Electricity Apps?

+1 on the ShellyEM (I have 3...) they are good and you can use their app and not use Home Assistant but I would recommend using as you can interrogate the data easier. With the Shelly EM you can log 2 circuits, or you can get the three phase one and log 3 circuits..

I'm logging 6 circuits in my house but I have solar PV, Heat pump etc I only use electricity in my house.

I'm actually looking for an energy monitor as well so this thread is relevant to me, but that response is actually comically unhelpful 😂

HI Yeah I can do a bit of a write up might take me a day or two by the time I get organized and take a few pics etc.

You dont need an electrician to do it as I did it myself but you have to be careful...the main thing is to power down everything on the consumer unit (trip the main switch and more) and even then treat everything as its live........I don't have anything to the P1 port on the meter (you don't need to) everything I have logged is done using ShellyEMs in the main consumer panel.

If I can I might get around to taking a pics this evening and writing a few of the steps up.

Hi

Sorry it took a bit I'm in the middle of setting up some ZigBee temp sensors around the house and boy are they frustrating to set up for some reason..

Anyway for my energy monitoring in my house I use Home Assistant (HA) Home Assistant (home-assistant.io) on a Raspberry Pi 4b as with HA you can do a way more with it than switching on the lights or using it to log your energy. Also, it is compatible with practically all vendors and suppliers so you are not stuck with one brand.

I am going to assume you know how to set up HA and to do all that stuff YouTube will be your friend there.

I decided to use the ShellyEM Shelly EM - Shelly Cloud from a recommendation from a poster on boards.ie. To be honest after looking at one or two YouTubes I was a bit nervous myself as you a have to mess around in your electrical board. Its a small little thing see picture below and basically what it does it monitors your electricity power/consumption/voltage/power factor and few other things through CT clamps. What this means is you clamp it around a cable in your main consumer board. So it logs circuits in your house not individual pieces of equipment unless they have their own circuit like the Heat Pump or your EV charger. Otherwise, it will log the downstairs plugs for example because that's a sperate circuit

The tricky part is that the Shelly needs power to do all this... and to do this you need to wire a live and neutral into the Shelly from the board to give it power. If you look at the picture above the two white wires are the CT clamps and the brown and blue are the power going to the Shelly. It sounds like you should be an electrician (any maybe you should..) but all that means is taking a feed off one on the trips in the board. See picture below the Brown and Blue highlighted are from the Shelly. What you do is loosen the clamp screws on the trip and slip the brown (live) into the L and the Blue (N) into the neutral side and you should be good. Make sure you fit them to the same circuit.

********Points to note POWER DOWN THE ENTIRE BOARD FROM THE MAIN TRIP SWITCH.....EVEN THINK ABOUT TRIPPING ALL THE TRIPS TO BE SURE...IF YOU HAVE SOLAR MAKE SURE YOU ISOLATE THIS ALSO....

ALSO ASSUME EVERY WIRE IS STILL LIVE EVEN AFTER DOING THIS AND IT CAN KILL YOU.....

USE INSULATED SCREW DRIVERS

IF YOU ARE NOT SURE YOU CAN DO THEN GET AN ELECTRICAN...IM AM NOT AN ELECTRICAN SO TAKE MY NOTES AS COMING FROM SUCH.********

(Also I just noticed there is some exposed conductor from a second Shelly feed (to the left on the highlighted one and I have fixed this now 😯

One you have the power connected you then need to fit the CT clamps to whatever circuit you want logged. One Shelly EM can log 2 circuits so you will want to do the Main ESB incomer and then whatever else. I have 3 Shellys so I log my PV, panels, the Heat Pump, the EV charger, the utility room sockets and then the kitchen island which has a dishwasher and a Quooker tap (but I rotate this last one around from time to time for example I might log the ovens.

The following picture shows the CT clamps the only thing here is that they need to be clamped around the live and they have to be orientated in the direction of the current (there is an arrow on the clamp) if you get them the wrong way it will show negative values. This is good though if you have PV as you can monitor if you are exporting as it will go to negative, just make sure you put the main ESB incomer clamp on before the PV feed

Once you have the Shelly's all wired in power back up the board (and hopefully nothing will trip) You then need to download the Shelly app and follow the instructions there to discover them. They use WiFi so you might need to make sure you have strong enough signal at the board. You can get readings and graphs off the Shelly app if you don't have HA.

Once they are connected to Wifi Home Assistant picked them up straight away and I could add them to my system. As I mentioned before I won't go into too much about setting up HA as that would take forever. But you can build all type of dash boards such as below

and they have a specific energy dashboard that is very useful such as below but it doesn't get into too much detail

For that I use Grafana in HA, you can really drill down into the data what came on when or how log its has been on.

Hope that helps some people, I wouldn't be too afraid in doing it but you do need some bit of cop on and if you are not comfortable around plugs and wires then this is not for you.

Please don't kill yourself and treat everything like it is live even when you think there is no power to the board.....

This is absolutely class.

It's something I might bring in a sparky friend to look over the board and I may struggle with room in the board but at least I know I can buy them and give it a go.

I assume I could add a new RCD /RCBO purely to power the shelly's directly versus a new circuit.

Good safety tips, plaster it everywhere in an edit maybe. (This is how I did this, you should not do this unless qualified etc. Ha)

Good to know, but the device is a simple solution for the vast majority of people. Still disappointing if the flashes are a sum of power in and out. Where is it described?

Home Assistant's Energy dashboard handles sending power back to the grid well, but you need to set up different monitors for your energy sources.

An EM clamp or reading from your panel supply could be used instead.

It does support power readings being net, but I expect you'd need to talk to the meter via the P port when that's available to get accurate readings specifically of consumption and generation.

I'm in the early days with this and it's my favourite home Assistant rabbit hole since I cracked 433MHz remote control!

This is a very useful thread. I'm only starting to look into it all. I have just recently got solar and am looking to monitor my house usage, solar generated and solar export. So I would need 3 clamps or just the two? And do I buy a Shelly with the 50a clamps or should I get a 120a?

Looking at this one: https://shop.shelly.cloud/shelly-em-50a-clamp-wifi-smart-home-automation-1#140

Hi everyone, is there any app / device I can use to accurately measure the impact a solar and battery system would have on my home? Any insights or thoughts would be really appreciated as it's a lot of money to invest without definitive knowledge of how much I could save.

Where did you buy from? Everywhere I've looked seems to be out of stock.

Anyone got info on ESb opening up the P1 Port?

what hub are you using with this?

Has anyone attached a Frient to their ESB meter box mine is a kamstrup dk 8660. Seems the simplest solution to track energy consumption.