Energy Monitoring Moves to the Big Leagues

A writer for the site shares his experience with home energy monitors, devices that track how much electricity individual circuits use so you can see where power is going and find ways to cut your bill. He's used the Emporia Vue, which clamps sensors called current transformers around branch circuits inside your electrical panel, and can track up to 16 circuits depending on the model. It gives a clear, easy-to-read picture of consumption and costs, but installing it means working inside a live electrical panel and adding hardware that takes up panel space.

He also mentions a newer entrant, Refoss, which uses the same clamp-on sensor technology but is built more for people who want to plug the energy data into a broader smart-home setup, with more customization options than Emporia's more polished, simpler interface. Which one suits a given household depends on whether you mainly want a straightforward view of your electricity use or you want to build automations around that data.

A third option, the Sense Home Energy Monitor, takes a different approach: instead of monitoring separate circuits, it reads electrical activity at the main line coming into the house and uses software to recognize the signatures of individual devices from that single point.

For anyone curious about where their electricity actually goes, these monitors offer a way to see it circuit by circuit or device by device, though setup generally involves opening up the panel, which is not a simple plug-and-play job.