How this thing works is you get a box to stuff inside your electrical panel, and you get a bunch of little clamp-on current transformers that go on all your hot wires.

You also get a BIG pair that are supposed to go over the mains, but my panel's from 1990 and they lay it out better these days, I couldn't fit the main CT's on in any way. The company confirmed that I could omit these and the software would Math It for now.

Once it's settled that you can not in fact "just live like this babe" it's time to trim some wires.

You know those screw-on terminals that are useful when breadboarding electronics? Well this is like that but in a connector.

and reinsert.

"The white goes to the right and everyone gets screwed" is easy to remember right now for some reason

The app is, to be fair, very good. It gives you a second-by-second graph of current draw, accurate enough that I just watched when my spouse's computer was updating and I could see how hard it was working at any given moment.

But it relies on a connection to Emporia's servers, so one day it might not be very good, but fortunately you can flash ESPHome onto these and fiddle around with Home Assistant. I didn't do that just yet, that'll be a project for another time.

(I'm joking of course, I would never let my spouse see that horror, much less ask her to Just Live With It Babe)

((I wasn't joking about my furnace being on the same circuit as my fridge. See, it's already providing me with valuable anxiety))

Anyway the hardware is pretty neat. It senses and processes and updates quick enough that it can detect those big inductive kicks when a stopped motor starts or a big filter cap charges up. Thing'll draw kilowatts for a split second and then settle down to double or triple digit watts, and this sensor can notice it.

That's good, that's relevant, because when you're shopping for solar panels, physics is all "You wanna run a fridge? Eh, couple hundred bucks, NBD. Oh, you wanna START a fridge? Five grand, hand it over."

I've posted before and I still maintain that fridges should have kick-starters

Well it's been a day, what've I learned?

* I should probably run at least one 'nother circuit 'cause yikes I've got a big inductive load in the water pressurizer sharing a circuit with stuff like my projector and games consoles etc
* My main monitor, a glorious 1600x1200 from the past that's Just Right, draws like 50 watts, which is about what my computer draws, which seems like A Lot
* Growing up in the 80's and 90's we were taught all about the perils of Standby Mode, ooh ENERGY VAMPIRES, wanna know how much that same power-gobbling monitor draws when it's doing the orange light? Absolutely bloody nothing

A handy thing that this energy monitor has taught me is that the dehumidifier uses WAAAAAY more electricity than I thought it did, like whoa

It's much cheaper/less polluting to run the whole-house air conditioning for like ten minutes than to let that tiny lil dehumidifier struggle for an hour

Maybe I'll post a thing on my secret blog about all the secret low-power ways to stay cool in the summer and toasty in the winter that don't involve much electricity

Gotta put more stuff in it to justify it not being secret anymore

@ifixcoinops to start with, I’d like to know the (easy) ways to do an audit.

From a smart home perspective, we’re pretty above average (but not advanced), but focused on HomeKit (with homebridge)

What energy meters do you recommend. What steps and process to use to audit the home (both once and ongoing)

@jasonkarns single biggest one bang-for-the-buck-wise was a $15 infrared thermometer and $10 of caulk

Second-biggest was some rolls of insulation batts, several podcasts and a new staplegun