Local Power monitoring with Refoss Breaker Monitor and Home Assistant
What's up ladies and gentlemen, I am Dylan the Technogiz guy and today we're playing with breakers, we're playing with wires, we're playing with clamps about to get spicy. How you doing ladies and gentlemen on this wonderful blessed day? So a couple weeks back I showed you how to set up Home Assistant. Watch that video up here. Last week I showed you how you can convert any light switch in your house. being a smart switch, as long as you at least have Zigbee and preferably Home Assistant. You can see that video up here. This week, we're taking it a step up. So I've done a lot of stuff with controlling your smart home. But what about monitoring
your smart home? What about monitoring the energy of your smart home? That's pretty important. I know that here where I live, I pay right about 19 ish cents a kilowatt hour. It's actually closer to 20 cents a kilowatt hour. but I'll give them the benefit of rounding down for this. And I am a nerd, let's be honest. I would really like to be able to audit my bill with Pico against what's actually coming into my house. So today, I am going to show you guys how you can monitor your incoming power and 16 of your breakers in your house in Home Assistant for a decent price. And if you're comfortable with it, can do it yourself. you're not comfortable
with it, disclaimer time. Today we are going to be opening the breaker panel and messing with breakers. If you are not comfortable with that, don't do it. You can learn if you want to, but if you are really not comfortable with high voltage electricity, hire somebody who is, or at the very least find a friend who is. If you're not comfortable with this, do not
do it. This whole video revolves around something that physically is designed to go inside of a breaker panel. So with all of that disclaimer out of the way, let's go to the table and unbox this thing. Space, time, bench cam. So this is the Reef-OS Smart Energy Monitor. What this guy is, is like we were talking about earlier, he goes in your breaker panel. So there's two big clamps and 16 little clamps, and you put the two big ones around the incoming load to your breaker panel. and you can pick 16 breakers of your chart's content to also monitor. You don't actually have to touch the breakers to put this in, all but, well, two
of them, and they can be low-current breakers if you want. Basically, the way that this works is the clamps go around the wires, and using magnetic inductance, they're able to pull a mathematical reading of the current flowing through the wire. This thing is Wi-Fi. I mention that because a lot of these units are Wi-Fi, a lot of them do have Ethernet. Again, I'm not an electrician and I don't know about your local codes, but you generally cannot or should not run low voltage, i.e. Ethernet, with AC. It can be done, but you have to do it in a very special way if you're trying to follow code. Now, realistically, is it going to hurt anything if your low voltage cable runs... next to an AC cable. It might hurt your ethernet
performance, maybe, but probably it's not going hurt anything. It's just a code thing. But with this, you don't have to worry. It pulls power from one of the breakers. Actually, it pulls power from two because it's a two-phase monitor, so it needs a reference voltage from both phases. We'll get into that once we get over there. But this is a Wi-Fi only device. To my knowledge, you cannot ethernet it. So that's not a problem. You don't have to worry about it. If you get one with ethernet and you would like the ethernet it that's fine just
look up your local code so that way you're doing it right anyway so we're gonna pull the box open right off the gate I see a scan code for my extended warranty I wonder if I don't scan it am I gonna get calls in like two years hi we're calling you about your energy monitors extended warranty you get a user manual now I am actually for once going to peruse this before I put it in the reason for that is I need to know which color wires they want to do what. So I will be not reading it, but perusing it. Looks like right here on the right hand side, you get the device. So this guy here is the actual brains of the operation here. It's got a little controller board in there and basically a bunch of headphone jacks. These are two and a half mil headphone jacks that they're just using that connector because it's convenient to unplug it. And then the top ones are three and a half millimeter. You have what I'm presuming
to be a reset button, wifi antenna spot and a spot. for the power. By the way, if you're wondering about Home Assistant, I am too. Apparently, as long as you either have one that has the updated firmware or if you get one of these and you update the firmware out of the box using the Refoss app, apparently they have a local Home Assistant integration that works pretty well. I really hope so, because I bought this on that recommendation. Right here on the box that was sitting next to the device. Looks like we have eight of the little connectors. I'm gonna pull those out and make a pile. I presume that this box will contain the other eight connectors. I was right. Then we have
this box. This box feels heavy. I'm guessing this is probably the terminals that monitor the main lugs coming in. So if I grab one of these, and I grab one these, You can see the size difference. This is the one that monitors your whole line coming into your entire breaker panel from whoever your provider is. This is the one that goes on the actual circuits. Then in the bottom of the box, it looks like you get some wire nuts and some black jumpers, presumably to make little tie ins if you have to splice something. You get a Wi-Fi antenna. and it actually comes on this little tiny knockout that you can knock out and actually get the antenna outside of your breaker panel because if you know how Wi-Fi works, you know that putting the Wi-Fi in metal box does not make Wi-Fi very good. And then we have the power
cable. So the power cable has four wires on it, LC, I that's a D, so LD. Basically, this is why I'm going to read the manual, because I know what the neutral's for. That needs to go to my neutral bus bar in the breaker panel. One of these gets power from somewhere, and then two of these are just going to tap into any breaker, but on different legs of the panel, so that way this has reference voltage from both sides. That is why I said I'm going to read the manual. Peruse the manual. Because other than white and potentially black, I don't know what they want from me with blue and red, and I could be wrong about that. Black
could actually be one of the reference ones, and the only thing I'm sure about is the neutral. So I'm going to peruse the manual. Okay, so after perusing this manual, which honestly I will give refoss credit here where it's due, honestly the manual is really solid. It gets straight to the point, it explains things that a lot of people might not know. As far as manuals go, not that I read a whole lot of them, this one's pretty solid. So it's pretty much like I figured. We have a white for the neutral, the black wire is going to go to our A bus,
the blue or the red wire is going to go to the B side bus, and then the blue wire is going to go to either of them to handle the other circuits. And I need all of the zones. If you were only using eight zones, you would not have this problem. We'd only have three wires. We are at the breaker panel. Now, remember that fun little disclaimer at the beginning of this video? I'm going to play it again. Disclaimer time. Today, we are going to be opening the breaker panel and messing with breakers. If you are not comfortable with that, don't do
it. Yet that little disclaimer, this is the part I was talking about. So this is a breaker panel. You should all know what this looks like. If you don't know what this looks like, you're probably too young to be doing any of this. Go get your parents. All right. Okay. So we gotta get inside the breaker panel as nice as this is. We gotta get inside because all the
wire bits are behind this metal. So be careful. You don't have to wear gloves. It's a good safety precaution. Okay, that took forever. So, once you get all the screws pulled out, most of the time your panel should have little tabs holding it in so it won't just fall. You just have to grab it and lift off. So, I just want to say something right now. If you're not familiar with electrical and you're starting this, Be very careful of this area, or in some cases, these may be on the bottom. Wherever they are, when you see the big ones with the big breaker, be very
careful around it. We have a 200 amp service here. So because of that, we have a 200 amp main breaker. I can flip this breaker, which I'm not going to do, because there are other people in my house right now, and all power to the everything below it will die. Now, the
part you still have to be safe about is these two wires right there are still live. They don't shut off. They come straight from the meter. So if you flip your main breaker, you do not want to still touch those wires. Those are not safe wires to touch unless you have
your meter pulled or if you're lucky and you have a disconnect. I don't have a disconnect here. We're working on that. I'm also not entirely sure why there's a spare 30 amp 240 breaker in here. Okay, so the next thing that I want to talk about is there are phases. So here
in the United States, we use two phase electricity to literally all of our friends over the pond. Sorry, this is going to be weird to you. But for those that don't know, in the US here, we have two phase Well, technically it's called split phase 220 volt. It is not true that we don't use 220 volt here. We just don't use it for everything. So we have power coming in this side. We power coming in this side. There's a neutral in here, but it's tied into a bunch of other neutrals. And then we have our breakers down. This 100 amp breaker here is a two pole
breaker because the sub panel that it's running is also getting 240 volts. Because of the way our electrical systems are set up, the first breaker, we're to call that slot A. Then the second breaker goes to B. Then it goes back to A and back to B. So all of these single breakers, you can figure out which leg they're coming in on based on where they are in the panel. If you see double breakers, it's because they're pulling from both legs. I'm going to
put the clamps in first because this is going to be little tight. Now, do remember when I told you to be very careful around these two lines? I'm gonna put this clamp around one of Alright, so I got the first one in, I don't know if you can see it there. Take this glove off real quick. I got the first one in. I want to show you this real quick. If you're doing this. These are all labeled A1 B1 B1 or A1 B1 A2 A2 B2 C1 C2. We won't get to C2 later. But
these are labeled. They're also polarity facing. So K, the arrow pointing towards load aka the load needs to be pointing this way or if you're putting these at the bottom that way. Basically, wherever the power is going, not coming, wherever it's going needs to go the arrow. Editor Dylan
here, I should take my own advice because I ended up putting mine on the wrong poles. I had my A1 on B1 and vice versa. I have the other one in for the other side. Okay. So I am knocking out the bottom because I'm realizing that this panel is cramped enough. So I am not gonna make it worse by having to keep the antenna in here. I knocked the wrong hole out. So now the antenna doesn't want to stay in. Remember, I never said that I was an electrician. In fact, I very adamantly said that I was not an electrician. I am literally just a guy
who, between my brother and YouTube, knows way too much for my own good. I've identified a breaker. that I would like to use for at least the first polarity. So this 15 amp here is on the A bus and it's a very non vital circuit. So I already turned the breaker off. Now I'm just going to... So the breakers off. I unscrewed the terminal just a little bit and I stuck the wire that they gave into it. I also made sure to screw it down really good and give it a little tug test. I'm not going to flip that breaker back on because this is still
unwired. So I'm going through wiring some of these up. I'll zoom in here so you guys can see that's a little too far. I put the first set on the double breaker that runs our garage sub panel because the garage sub panel has an air compressor on it and it soon will have small mini split unit on there. So I want to monitor its power. The second AB set that I have is on the little sub panel switch on this side. And that's actually that sub panel right
there. And that does our laundry and the shed. So the laundry is the one I'm mostly worried about because the shed breaker is usually off. The third set I just put on the air conditioner, which right there. No, not on my hand. Right there. So those two right there are the air
conditioner. I'm just going to keep going through and we'll come back when I have these where I want them. I'm also taking notes as I go because I'm not actually going to be closing my panel up. I'm going to figure out what some of this stuff is and I'm only going to track the stuff
I actually care about because our breaker panel is also not labeled on top of being a disaster. I didn't do it. So the panel is put back together. Everything works. We're good. Sorry, I didn't film a portion of this video. I meant to. I wanted to film the final few parts of me putting clamps on, but that ended up taking way longer because in the end I had all of the circuits I really wanted to cover covered, but then there was still power that I couldn't account for. So because the panel is terribly labeled, if at all, I spent a whole lot of time just kind of moving clamps around, turning things on, seeing what worked. I got it to where I like it. So we're going to jump back over to my desk. I will show you what it looks like in Home
Assistant. And I'll also show you their app if you're not using Home Assistant and you just want to pick up this, you can still do energy monitoring. Okay, we're going to open up their app here. I'm going to click add. It found my meter. I've actually already had
mine set up. I unset it up for the sake of this portion of the video, but essentially it's just going to connect and you're going to put it on your wifi and then it will either get discovered in Home Assistant or you will have to just manually add it in Home Assistant. going to go through and do some config and then you're done. We can come in and we can see the different legs of things. You can even go in and change the power factor. So yeah, their app is okay. You do not have to enable anything else to get this to work in Home Assistant.
Okay, we're back at my desk and I have Home Assistant loaded up. You can see it's actually the next day. I've already been messing with some of this. So I already have a card set up. I already started working with the energy dashboard. but I don't think it's quite there yet. I gotta figure some stuff out. I'm go into devices and services and the integration you're looking for is refoss. So your mileage may vary, but mine did not auto detect like when, you know, home assistant just detects the integration. I'm assuming that's probably something to do
with refoss on their end. And I say this because the person whose review I watched to buy this said that it was kind of a still a very early stage integration from the developer refos. So some things I noticed. Everything in my network that is IOT related, including smart home appliances go on a specific IOT VLAN. The only thing in my smart home that is not on that IOT VLAN is Home Assistant. It has access that VLAN, but it's not sitting on that VLAN, primarily at least. The issue is, it would not detect over the other VLAN at all. Now mind you, Home
Assistant technically does have an IP address on that VLAN because through a second nick, I have that VLAN sectioned off, right? So it should detect and it normally does not have a problem. However, for whatever reason, when I went to go search for the power meter, It just didn't find it. So I deleted the meter out of my account, reset it up and put it on my trusted network. As soon as I came in, clicked add integration and went to refoss, it found it right away. So for whatever reason, even though HOME Assistant is on that VLAN in its
own fashion, refoss would not connect to it through my VLAN. So at the moment I have that on my main VLAN, which I'm not super thrilled about. So refoss. I know that this is probably a small use case for this, especially, you know, in this kind of home assistant space. But can
you guys either figure out why it's not multicasting and working right? Or can you make the integration have the ability to do a manual kind of like selection? Because I knew it's IP. I could have just manually typed in the IP, but that is not an option that you have. All of these energy clamp Sensors that you see here that are measuring kilowatt hours. You can ignore those I had to add those in manually. Those are not a part of the refoss system. They should be But they're not I'm not gonna do a video on how I set that up But I will answer it in the comments and if enough people want to see it I'll do like a short or something on YouTube. It's not that hard to set that up But it took me like four hours to figure out
how to set it up. So If anyone wants to see how to do that, let me know. If I go to A1 power, A1 remember is the load one lug, the one side coming in of the breaker panel. So that's the main right there. So right now on the A side, we'll call it, there is 715 Watts of power coming down the line. I scroll all the way down to B1. There's 985, almost a kilowatt of power coming down that line. And you get voltage, you get current, you get power, you get power factor. Here's where this gets weird. Now this is more of a gripe with Home Assistant.
The energy panel only lets you measure energy. That's gonna sound a little weird. The problem is, is that all of these sensors, current, power, voltage, are what that sounds like. Power, not energy. Power and energy are slightly different. Energy is how much power over a given time gets used. It's also how most electric service providers bill you. How much power you pull in a set amount of time. The energy dashboard is set up kind of like an analytics page, but it doesn't do live analytics well. In fact, Almost nobody seems to want to see the live
stuff. I want a nice fancy dashboard for what is happening right now. Other than my few issues, which again, not all of them are issues with refoss. The product so far has been really solid. I downloaded their app. I did have to make an account, which OK, fine. I had to put it on my Wi-Fi. I had that issue where I could not put it on my IoT VLAN. I hope that gets fixed, because that really sucks. I'm not comfortable with that. It's just, I like the
compartmentalization. But other than that, really did not have any issues with it. Install was pretty well done. I did end up reading the entire manual because I needed to, but I got it done and I'm getting useful data out of it already. And then I have problems with how Home Assistant handles energy management. Maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. I hope I'm doing something wrong because I really want to be able to see, yeah, the analytics and stuff and I want to know. if Home Assistant can predict what my bill is from Pico. But
I'd also really like if I could see what's going on in my house right now at a glance. So ultimately, what do I think of the refoss energy manager in the breaker panel? Well, besides the big issue that I had where I have to keep it on my main network instead of my IoT network, I am also having an issue where some of my clamps seem to be labeled wrong, as in the arrow is facing the wrong direction. I know because I very meticulously made sure that all of the arrows were facing the right directions on the circuits that I put them on. Yet I still have a couple that are saying they are backwards. The arrow is 100 % in the right direction.
So I'm gonna get back into the panel and flip those so they're the wrong direction, but so they read right. Ultimately, I think that if you're interested in smart home energy monitoring and you use Home Assistant, you want it to integrate nearly perfectly with Home Assistant, I think this is a great product that you guys should pick up. I know ReefFoss has been a new player to the space of kind of open and home assistant. And so far it's looking like they're doing good work. They just need a little bit more to push over the line and really beat their competition. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, please leave a like. If you're new to the channel, please subscribe. I am Dylan, Dtechnic is guy. I will see you guys in the
next video. But until that time, remember, keep it peaceful.
2025-04-05 12:35
