A number of years ago, I wrote about monitoring my energy usage with Home Assistant. At the time I was using a Rainforest Automation Eagle Energy device that connected to my SDGE smart meter. That device worked quite well for a long time, but in the last few years became unreliable. I bought a newer version of the device and it was less stable than what I already had, so I returned it and dealt with it.

About 2 years ago, SDGE announced that they wouldn’t provision any new monitoring devices to connect to their meters, but as long as your device worked, you could continue to use it. Given that I wouldn’t be able to try any other device after this time, I did everything I could to keep monitoring with my current device, I tried different things such as polling the device at different intervals, sending a reboot command every hour and most recently to power cycling the outlet with a USP-PDU-Pro connected to Home Assistant.

Last week, the monitoring device finally gave up and stopped connecting to the meter and stopped reporting anything. In order to continue monitoring my energy usage, I’d have to look for a different solution. There are a number of solutions on the market that use CT (current transformer) clamps and are installed in the electrical panel. I had been aware of several products, but most had cloud based services for recording data. This was pretty much a non starter for me.

Somehow I came across the Aeotec Home Energy Meter 8 which is a Z-Wave device and only connects locally. After looking at the installation instructions, I wasn’t comfortable installing it myself as the clamps have to go on the main wires coming into the house and turning off the main breaker wouldn’t disconnect the power. I ordered the device and scheduled an electrician to come out; at first I thought the estimate was a little on the high side, but after seeing the effort the electrician had to go through to get the clamps on the wires, it was absolutely worth the cost. I have a relatively small panel and the main wires are close together and getting the large clamps on them was a bit difficult.

One of the main things in installing the clamps is getting them oriented in the right direction; there are arrows on them and printed instructions. I watched the electrician install them and caught one of them flipped in the wrong direction. Unfortunately, I think the other one was installled backwards. Luckily the orientation just flips the consumption vs production in the meter and makes the total consumption/production incorrect. The meter reports production and consumption on a per phase basis, so in Home Assistant, I renamed some of the entities and used Node-RED to do some calculations.

After a day of playing with the values, I think I’m back to where I was last week with energy monitoring.

What will I do with this information? Probably nothing besides look at pretty graphs showing my usage.