Rainforest EAGLE-200 Energy Monitoring Smart Meter Gateway and Smart Home Hub

I've been waiting to get my hands on the new Rainforest Eagle-200 since we installed solar panels on our home about 5 months ago. So I ordered it the first day it became available. This unit replaces the original Rainforest Eagle energy gateway. The Eagle-200 makes it very easy to accurately monitor power consumption in real time without wired connections. There's no need to open the electrical service panel to install current sensors. It communicates with the utility's smart meter via the ZigBee wireless protocol. Installation is pretty straight forward. We have Southern California Edison, so as soon as I unboxed it, I went to SCE's website and registered the gateway online. You have to leave the device powered up within 75-feet of the meter while the power company "provisions" it. For us, SCE got the Eagle gateway paired with our smart meter in less than 12-hours. The utility will notify you by email when the unit has been successfully registered. If you haven't already, you should also set up an account with Rainforest Automation. You then connect the device to the internet by Ethernet cable or wirelessly. The Eagle gateway actually broadcasts a WiFi signal that you can connect to with a laptop or smartphone. This allows you to sign in and hand off the wireless connection to your home WiFi. Now you can go to the Rainforest Cloud site to see your energy use in real time. But here's where it got a bit tricky for me. Because the Eagle-200 is brand new, the local and web based user interface for tweaking the settings is still VERY rudimentary. I needed to link the device to Wattvision, a 3rd party energy data processing service. So I contacted Rainforest support for help. They were VERY responsive. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did they answer all of my questions, they even took care of linking the Eagle gateway to my Wattvision account from their end. Everything works perfectly now. Nice! I'll try to update this review after I put some "mileage" on the device. As for right now, I'm impressed. The hardware seems to be very good, but the customer support from Rainforest is "five-stars" outstanding.

Works sometimes. Will break connection to the cloud often and stop reporting data. Doesn't recover on its own when this happens, requires a power cycle. This problem seems to go back to the EAGLE-100 after some searching. (Update: I found tha the local API becomes brain-dead when the device gets in this bad state. The device responds to ping, SSH, and the local API even returns status 200, but the response is empty instead of returning any XML) Both radios are unusable. In my house, both radios have a range of about 20 feet. I ended up attaching the EAGLE to the wall directly opposite to where the power meter is attached at the outside of the house, and running ethernet over a HomePNA adapter back to my router. Their website is quite bad. It frequently breaks requiring a reload. You can only get precise data (~10 second intervals) for the last 5 minutes. The website displays hourly demand for the previous week, and daily demand for the previous month. Since the website is supposed to be the main access point to your data, this product is not terribly useful out of the box. I wanted more precise data so I wrote a Prometheus exporter for it you can find on docker hub / github. Their API is not great; it returns malformed XML, and their XML tag usage is very inconsistent. More worryingly, Rainforest displays blatant disregard for security and privacy. I discovered the WattVision and Skycentrics cloud integrations were sending data over http, not https. I notified Rainforest of this problem and they claimed it is fixed, but I have no desire to send or their associates any more data. It is 2018 folks. If you push or receive private user data over the Internet in plain text, you don't deserve to write any more software. There's also a review on the older Eagle ( Rainforest EAGLE Energy Monitor and ZigBee Smart Energy Gateway ) detailing how the local security is broken; the SSH version is ancient and the password is simple enough to bruteforce. I verified the SSH version on the Eagle-200 is OpenSSH-6.6, which is 4 years old instead of 12, but I haven't yet tried to brute force the device. However, I did verify that the Eagle-200 maintains an active backdoor VPN connection to Rainforest's servers, just like the Eagle-100. This is not the same thing as pushing data to the cloud. The VPN connection is ONLY used by Rainforest to remotely access your device (and thereby your home network) at their whim. I don't recall signing any agreement giving Rainforest this kind of access to my network. This is the equivalent of PG&E copying the keys to your house, without telling you. The evidence is clear that Rainforest and associates have a disregard for security and privacy that blows Facebook completely out of the water. Worse, the evidence is widespread and historical, indicating the problem is organizational and systemic. I would not accept any fixes, patches or apologies, only a new history of better practices over coming years, before I would trust a Rainforest device on my home network. Sadly, the EAGLE-200 is the only networked meter reader that PG&E allows, and I want access to my data, so I'll still be using this. My plan is to put it on an airgapped network so it has no Internet access, and will collect data via its local API.

***EDIT*** SCE is discontinuing new enrollments on it's HAN network effective 02/01/2020. If you're not signed up by then, this great device is effectively a paperweight. Existing enrollments and devices will continue to work and if you're buying and activating before 02/01/2020, you should be good. Contents of FAQ below - which you will not find on the SCE website as it was sent to existing enrollments only. SCE FAQ Received: Will my existing HAN Device be disconnected on January 31, 2020? No. If your device is currently connected to the meter, it should remain connected and should continue to provide you wit h your usage reads. SCE' s closing of HAN on January 31, 2020 should not impact the existing device to meter connection of your HAN device. Do I need to take any action to ensure my connected HAN device does not get disconnected on January 31, 2020? No. There is no act ion for you to take. The January 31, 2020 date is specific only to new customers wishing to register a new HAN device. Existing HAN devices will stay connect ed and continue to work as usual. What if my existing HAN device disconnects from my meter after January 31, 2020? SCE will attempt to reconnect the device to the meter and re-establish your net work connect ion. In the event t hat SCE cannot fix the issue, you will be directed to use SCE's alternate solutions for HAN. Will I be able to replace my existing HAN device with a new device after January 31, 2020? No. The device that is connected to the meter at the time of HAN's closure cannot be replaced with a new device. In the event that the exist in g device disconnect s fr om the net work and cannot be reconnected, you will be directed to an alternate solution for HAN. Will I still receive the Daily Cost Snapshot (DCS) alert on my HAN device, providing my accounts Projected Bill and Bill-to-Date energy costs? Yes. As long as you are currently eligible for that feature, and as long as you r device is connected to the meter, you should continue to receive the DCS alerts to your HAN device. You may also receive your projected next bill and bill-to-date energy costs by enrolling in Budget Assistant alerts. UPDATE 12/21/18: Rainforest has stepped up product stability SIGNIFICANTLY.... 6 MONTHS AND COUNTING - ZERO DISCONNECTS. Literally, flawless operation and quick responses when/if other issues have occurred (mostly web portal, but not a hard-stop for me personally) PRIOR REVIEW: For 4 months now, I've been getting the runaround from Rainforest support. First it's a Kernel update, but not way to check that online. Next, it's a firmware update. after that it's acknowledgement there is an issue "I am led to believe it was a firmware issue as other users with 2.14.5.305 had similar "...Yet, no followup or fix. ISSUE: This device repeatedly disconnects from the cloud (not from Zigbee) near midnight on random days and does not and will not reconnect automatically on it's own. You have to sit there and constantly watch the lights and the only way to fix is you gotta pull the power cord like it's 1995. Ridiculous. Meanwhile, there is no warning when this happens. Rainforestcloud.com = worthless and does not even notify you or have the option. So if you like babysitting electronics, this

Product works great! I have a solar array, and this allows me to see our usage/production historically and real time. I live in Illinois with ComEd as my electric company. I contacted ComEd via email with my information and they gave me access to the meter. This allows us to make better choices about our power. I also found many things that leech power while plugged in and turned off, further lowering our power consumption! My only complaint, the user interface is sometimes slow and needs to be restarted. Otherwise, wonderful.

It's a great idea. Sadly it took PG&E and a manager a while to get it connected to my Smartmeter. I was excited, I was getting data. So you don't mind you data going to a public site? You can use the poorly documented API to read the data from the unit. But sadly, it falls asleep and it doesn't understand net metering. But a firmware update fixed the incorrect usage during solar power generation. But it also fell asleep. Only recourse is to power it off and on. Another firmware update has made it more stable. But I still have issues with the local API returning odd errors and no Instantaneous power data. The trouble ticket has been open for months. They no longer respond. I rate that support near 2 stars. It has no logging, it has no customer access other than the poor documentation. There are no working examples of code to use the API. It doesn't give you the secret sauce to login. You need to know how to base encode and use : as a delimiter for user:password. A few extra works and a simple Perl script would go a long way to show a working example that could be used. When it works, it's great. When you need support not so much. It would be SO nice if the source was made available as public domain. It would be so nice if they listed error messages that API could return. It would be wonderful if they could read those error messages and fix their application. There is an unused button, it would be so nice if it would restart the software without losing all the data when it falls asleep. It would be so nice if it say why it can't connect to the cloud application. How would it say it? You could login in and look at the log. It would be nice if could route its syslog messages to an external server that you can select. No firewall, no security, no security logging. A perfect device for hackers to compromise and you'd never know. Security of the device is 'trust us'. A few hours after posting this review, the EAGLE-200 bricked itself. It's still under warranty and I wait for the vendor support response. 7/20/18 update, opened a ticket, and they advised outage was due to a bad update, it's back working again.

Initially worked fine, but then my meter died and had to be replaced. Needed to re-add it to the new meter, but when I did all of my connected services wouldn't start working again. Finally figured out that it was because the old meter was still on my account, and that's the data going to PV Output and Home Assistant. Contact editor support to remove the old meter (and explicitly asked them not to remove the working one), which they confirmed with me and then promptly removed the working one. That was a week ago, and they haven't replied to my emails since, even though I responded shortly after they removed the wrong meter. If there's ANY other way for you to get this data without using Rainforest, do that.

Bought the Eagle 200, recommended by PG&E. They were great and programmed the device on their end in 10 minutes. The I configured the wifi which was more steps than I would have thought in this Apple/Alexa great installation world, but it worked. Solid wifi LED on. But when I created the portal account and entered the ID the box would not connect. Some blinks but no solid cloud LED. Even the wifi LED would blink after trying to access the cloud. I contacted support, which was sure easy to do, and got a very quick response saying they needed to update the firmware. I said OK and by the time I came back the box connected with a solid cloud LED and a nice graph on the portal. Really happy! But after dinner the portal timed out and I couldn't log in got the error message "Looks like the server is taking too long to response. Please try again later." Trying the iPhone app returns "Invalid Credentials" which I guess also means the server is down... And I notice the cloud LED on the box is blinking again (but this time not causing the wifi LED to blink so I have hope it is just a server issue). Don't know how ofter this happens but It didn't ever stay up for one day. Hopefully the server is fixed by tomorrow. So 5 stars for great concept and great tech support, minus 3 for unreliability and dependence on the unreliable cloud portal, so net 2 stars. Did I mention unreliable? Next day: the cloud portal worked.

Waited months for the Eagle 200 to get back in stock and as it stands now, it was worth the wait. The device has been reporting energy use for about an hour without issue. I'm currently using both the Android EnergyVUE app and the Rainforest Cloud Service web interface. In my case, I had to connect with ComEd of Illinois to get the device registered. I'm not sure if it was necessary because I registered the device with ComEd before installing it on my LAN (as per the instructions) or if it was necessary because it was not listed as a supported device when I set it up at the ComEd site. Regardless, I'm glad we connected. As soon as the setup failed, I received an email from ComEd with minutes which (1) suggested that for security reasons, that I turn OFF Rainforest Automation Remote Support/VPN service and (2) send them (ComEd) a photo of the Eagle 200 label containing the MAC/Install addresses (required for setup). After hitting send, ComEd had me up and running within minutes. They were absolutely AWESOME. So far Rainforest Automation (device and cloud service) is delivering on the promise and I'm very happy. IMPORTANT NOTE: ComEd recommends users turn OFF the VPN / Rainforest Remote Access service via the device's browser interface. To do this, get the Eagle 200 IP address from your router, use your web browser to log in using the cloud ID and install code for username/password, head to Advanced Gateway and uncheck the box. UPDATE: It's been 3 months since I installed the EAGLE-200. The device itself, along with the associated Android app and web service, have worked absolutely flawlessly!