My Experience with Emporia’s Vue Home Energy Monitor

About my Setup

My Home

I have solar panels and a battery that feed into a Load Center (LC). Most of my home’s loads/circuits are wired to the “House Panel” (a sub off of the LC) while a few others are wired into each of the Load Center, the Garage Panel, and the Main Panel (yes, it’s complicated; the home is more than a century old! More about it in my Understanding my Tesla Energy System post).

My Emporia Vues and Smart Plugs

• I started with three 2nd gen Vues about 2½ years ago. I recently added a fourth Vue, 3rd gen, after adding loads to the Main Panel (shuffling the new Vue into the House Panel, which is the most cramped).
• I also got four Emporia Smart Plugs so I could more accurately monitor individual devices that aren’t on a dedicated circuit.

My Findings and Opinions

Hardware

• 🟢 Overall: Does what it’s supposed to do! Some spottiness when setting up, but haven’t experienced any other reliability issues (other than CT connections on gen 2, mentioned below).
• 🟢 CT connections to the Vue
  • 🟨 2nd gen: Connections come loose easily. I was missing data and had to push connections back on several occasions.
  • 🟢 3rd gen: Connections are more secure.
• 🟢 CT wiring flexibility/bulkiness
  • 🔶 2nd gen: Wires have a fixed length, so that may limit reach, and they add a lot of bulk/mess if there’s more than you need. I could barely fit the 2nd gen in my House Panel.
  • 🟢 3rd gen: Wires can be trimmed. It’s also helpful that wires only come out of three sides of the Vue unit rather than all four.

Functionality

• 🟢 [Hardware & Software] Real-time, 1-second granularity monitoring (with ±2% accuracy) — you can see usage on the main screen (if you can find it) and graph instantly!
• 🟨 [Hardware] Can’t use branch CTs on high-amp circuits such as solar (70A) and subpanel feeders.
  • How it affects me: I can’t use CTs on my subpanel feeders (e.g., from my LC to my House and Garage) since they’re 70-100A (and the branch CTs have a max amperage of 50). It isn’t necessary to measure subpanel feeders though if you have a nested Vue in the subpanel (as the nested Vue can monitor the incoming feeder). Or, in other words, you will need additional monitors if you want discreet visibility of a feeder. Fortunately, when it comes high-amp circuits, I only have one, 70A solar, and the 50A CTs fit around it, and they’ll never produce more than 30A.
• 🟨 [Software] Multiple Vues (within a single panel) can’t be merged. They show up separately, or one has be nested (misrepresenting the wiring hierarchy and possibly energy flow).
• 🟨 [Software] Can’t both “merge” circuits and have them be bidirectional.
  • How it affects me: I have CTs on both poles of my batteries. I can’t merge the poles, so I have to have two entries (one for each pole) for each battery (just a minor annoyance).
• 🔶 [Software] Minimal Notifications/Alerts support. Emporia only supports monitoring one device configured as a ‘Cooktop/Range/Oven/Stove’ per monitor.
  • How it affects me: I’d love to know if my refrigerator is running abnormally (including when the fridge has been left open), or when my sump pump kicks in (or hasn’t run in several hours when it should be).
• 🟢 [Software] 3rd-party integration of Smart Plugs. Enabling 3rd-party integrations allows additional control Smart Plugs. Personally, this has minimal value for me. I have smart plugs from several other vendors also, and the ones that I have from Emporia are primarily for monitoring energy usage…
• 🟨 [Software] Can’t disable control of Smart Plugs. I have smart plugs on a handful of devices only for the purpose of monitoring, such as our water heater and refrigerator. It’s too easy to accidentally turn these critical appliance off, especially since these Smart Plugs also show up in 3rd-party integrations, such as the Google Home app.
  • 💡 My suggestion: It’d be great to be able to disable control of Smart Plugs so they can’t be accidentally turned off (this setting would need to propagate to smart home integrations one way or another).

User Interface / User Experience (UI/UX)

• 🔶 Configuring a monitor as bi-directional isn’t apparent and is more difficult than necessary. During setup, the app asks whether the system has solar or energy storage. This is its indirect way of asking whether there will be bi-directional flow. Then it requires solar and batteries be turned off so that it can determine which direction of energy flow is “consuming.” If you didn’t do this set this up initially (you didn’t have solar or battery before, or whatever) and want to set up/fix bidirectional monitoring, then you just have to know to use ‘Reset WiFi / Solar Setup’ to set that up and then jump through hoops (e.g., shut off solar/battery or wait until those aren’t producing).
  • Further, ‘Reset WiFi / Solar Setup’ is finicky. On one device, it took me more than a dozen tries over the course of hours because the reconfigure UI had trouble finding the device, or because of the reconfigure failed halfway through (after which I would have trouble finding the device again).
  • 💡 My suggestions:
    • Make it more apparent what the “Solar Setup” is doing (e.g., label it “Enable bidirectional monitoring”).
    • Make it easier to set up. For example,
      • Assume the CTs are installed correctly and that the detected directions are correct, and/or
      • Make it easy to toggle the direction if it’s wrong (i.e., just a toggle switch rather than having to ‘Reset WiFi / Solar Setup.’
• 🟨 Configuring a branch circuit to be bi-directional is not as obscure or difficult, but it could be easier. It also requires energy to be flowing so it can detect direction (in other words, you can set up bi-direction flow if there isn’t energy flowing).
  • 💡 My Suggestion: Similar to above, just assume the CTs are installed correctly and make it easy to toggle direction if it’s wrong.
• 🟢 Cross-platform & Desktop: You can do most things on desktop as well as mobile since the app is Flutter (which works across platforms).
• 🔶 The tree of circuits is difficult to parse and understand on the main, “Home,” screen. It’s a combination of:
  • Hierarchy only through indentation (no lines from children to parents or linking children, nor indicators of depth), which can be difficult to follow and trace across many lines (or even screens).
  • The indentation is complicated by icons (smart plugs’ controls defy indentation; EV circuit isn’t properly indented and has a double icon 🤔).
  • ‘Total Usage’ and ‘Balance’ lines are a kind of metadata that get their own lines like the circuits of that device. Meanwhile, Total Usage isn’t indented under the device it’s about, and balance is at the other end of the list and is indented.
  • Line shading is just alternating; they have nothing to do with hierarchy.
  • While you can custom sort circuits within a monitor, you can’t sort nested monitors (relative to other nested monitors or relative to branch circuits).
  • 😵‍💫
  • 💡 My Suggestions:
    • Add explicit lines from children to parents.
    • Make parents sticky so it’s easier to see where in the hierarchy a circuit/device is.
    • Get rid of alternate line shading; instead, use shading to differentiate monitors/headers from circuits.
    • Move Total Usage and Balance into the monitor’s row
    • Allow custom sorting of nested monitors within the monitor (relative to other nested monitors and branch circuits).
• 🔶 Battery charging is included in ‘Total Usage’, making it difficult to see how much energy we’re actually using.
• 🔻 Information Architecture (IA) / app navigation are unintuitive. Just a few examples:
  • If you click on a circuit on the Home screen, which takes you to the graph for that circuit, then navigate “back,” it leaves the app (you have to tap on ‘Home’ in the bottom nav to return home). 😵
  • If you click on ‘Graph’ in the bottom nav while on a device’s control page, it doesn’t take you to that device’s graph (it takes you to the last graph you were at).
  • You can’t configure a circuit or smart plug from the its graph view; you have to find it under ‘Manage/Setup Devices’ in the side menu (but you can get to the smart plug’s configuration from it’s control screen). 😒
  • Similarly, you can’t export data from a circuit’s graph page; you have to re-navigate to the circuit within the export menu.
  • 💡 My Suggestion: Drastic overhaul or even complete rewrite of the app for better UI/UX and IA! 😬
• 🔶[Poor] Very poor ability to navigate the graph. Because you can’t specify a time you’d like to see nor click on a bar to see that period at a higher granularity, you can’t reasonably see a by-seconds graph more than a couple minutes in past, by-minute graph more than a couple hours in the past, etc. It’s also too easy to lose your place: accidentally tap elsewhere, leave and return to the app (e.g., for a phone call), or even just pull your phone’s system tray down partially!
• 🔶[Poor] Data export is very tedious.
  • You can only do it for one monitor or Smart Plug at a time (I have a total of eight).
  • You can’t do it from the device’s graph; you have to find it in the ‘Export Raw Data to CSV’ section.
  • You can only download about a month at a time.
  • It entails multiple steps: choose the device, set the dates, choose ‘Export Data’, open you email, download it.
• 🔶[Poor] Have see nearly zero UI/UX improvements (information architecture / app navigation, cosmetics, etc.) in the 2½ years that I’ve been using it.

In Closing

Emporia’s energy monitoring solution has a good foundation — solid hardware (especially gen 3) and flexibility to do very detailed monitoring (especially with subpanels and smart plugs) that may not be able to be achieved with Sense or Span. It’s great for simpler setups and casual monitoring (but then Sense or Span might be good alternatives), and it can handle more complex setups (in ways that may be out of reach of Sense and Span) but it won’t be pleasant and you may run in limitations…

The software (backend and frontend), on the other hand, is several steps behind the hardware and seems to be neglected. There have been minimal improvements in software capabilities (such as bidirectional monitoring), and the UI/UX of app is among the worst I use 😢 (it does still get the job mostly done). It seems to me like there’s an imbalance in their development (allocation towards hardware vs software); their hardware recently got a new generation while I’ve noticed only a tiny bit software improvement. Some investment on the software side could make this an unmatched product without compromises.