Refoss Smart Home Energy Monitor, Real-Time Accurate Energy Consumption Tracking with Home Assistant, Electricity Usage Monitor with 16 x 60A Circuit Sensors, 36-Month History, Solar Metering, 2.4 GHz

I have been trying out the Refoss EM16 Smart Energy Monitor for a while now, and I must say, I'm impressed. It was easy to install—good instructions and helpful online videos meant the whole process was simple and quick. Took about an hour to have everything up and running, and all plugged in to the Refoss app successfully. I like best that this product is so versatile and thoughtful in design. You can just plan and label your circuits ahead of time, and if a clamp is showing up in the negative direction, you can simply reverse it in the app without the need to rewire. If you require additional circuits to be monitored, you can bus their wires together into a CT so long as they're on the same phase. The application is simple to operate, giving real-time monitoring of all the circuits, and detailed energy history by day, week, month, or year. Home Assistant support is where this product really shines. EM16 auto-commands and provides complete local access to all the data of each circuit, enabling advanced automation without the cloud. Solar system owners will love Zero Feed-In Automation—putting extra solar energy to use powering devices such as EV charging points or water heaters rather than returning it to the grid. The recent firmware releases saw the addition of various useful features, including channel merging, export of CSV data, improved dashboards, and inverting CT readings in software. The releases show that Refoss is refining the product according to feedback from users. Overall, the EM16 is a wonderful, budget-friendly energy monitoring system—easy to install, full of data, and ideal for smart home residents as well as anyone wishing to gain better control of and track their home energy usage. Highly recommended.

I am extremely happy that I bought this Refoss Smart Energy Monitor EM16 to track the energy consumption in my home. I did a favor myself by watching a couple videos on youtube to make sure that this product meets all my needs and I can handle the installation comfortably and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU DO THE SAME. Product is packed pretty well with all items you need (except screwdriver and some protective gear) and also comes with a user manual. User manual includes Installation guide with step-by-step instructions, Troubleshooting Guide, Technical specifications and Warranty. First, I have read the manual and all step-by-step instructions and then unboxed the rest of the items. I opened up my panel and took a picture and on a white paper I wrote down what breakers are connected to line A or to line B, that helped me to decide on connecting Lc to La as more breakers that I am planning to monitor are connected to line A. In your case, it may vary so make sure to look at the picture of your panel and plan accordingly to meet your energy monitoring needs. Refoss Smart Energy Monitor supports up to 16 channels and comes with 16 connectors excluding A1 and B1 (they go on to your service lines). I followed the instructions from the installation guide, and I felt it was pretty straight forward. Few of my breakers (A/C, Dryer and Range etc.) are 2 poles so I used both channels A and B and merged those channels (You may use one and change Circuit factor). Their app has a good feature where you can merge channels and label them (I have labeled them as A/C, Dryer etc.). Their app has a handful of settings that you can customize your setup based on your installation. To name some settings here, you can name each channel, merge channels, circuit factors (helps in case of using one circuit on multipole breakers), consumption alert etc. I don't have the Home Assistant set up so I can't say what functionality you get there. I wish they support other Smart home platforms, so it helps many users with their integrations (Smartthings etc.). About customer/technical support aspects, I had an opportunity to work with their support team as I noticed an issue, after the contact they asked me to share photos, and they suggested some changes to make sure that it is not an issue with the product. After completing the suggested changes, the issue still persisted and that helped them determine it was an issue with the monitor, and they sent a replacement and after installing the new one it worked flawless. Though their support is by email, they are pretty responsive and very helpful and knowledgeable. About the Product design aspects, it is well designed by keeping DIY installations in mind. Concept of using headphone-jack style and clamp style connectors is pretty easy to handle and helps with quick installation. After 4 weeks of monitoring, I can say that Refoss Smart Energy Monitor EM16 is pretty reliable to monitor energy consumption, and I highly recommend this product.

This is a Home Assistant specific review. If you are using the app and on a typical network, only #1 would be of interest. Overall it works great! It was easy to setup and integrate into home assistant. However there are a few things I did notice about it: 1. It has 3 sets of 6 channels and a voltage measurement for each. It does not work will if you have a single unit and want to measure an even number of circuits between 2 phases. (and by work I mean exact measurements. It will still be close) However I had 2 units so I was able to split the circuits and it worked out. For this I have to give it 4 stars as it does not easily support a typical split phase configuration. 2. It requires using their app and making an account for the initial setup and connection to wifi. The app will error out if your phone is on a different vlan than the wifi you selected but it still connects. 3. The unit requires internet access at least 1 time before working locally. 4. The home assistant integration that is officially supported automatically scans for devices and if it is on a different subnet, it will not be found. This can be solved by using the integration from HACS and entering an IP address. Overall I am happy with the device and that I do not need to flash custom firmware but still run it on an internet restricted VLAN with Home Assistant!

Having used this device for a few months, I finally feel comfortable writing my review. The product seems well designed, but lacks UL certification. I did get a bit of a shock when plugging in the Main sensors (A1 and B1), but after contacting support, I guess that can happen. I just need to be more careful. The app is helpful but it could be more intuitive. For example, the app doesn't let you keep a sort order of sensors and it can't send an alert if your amperage exceeds a certain level (which is my main interest). My hope was that I could use the sensor to ensure that I wasn't using my 100 AMP service above capacity and receive notifications if that was the case, but I've had to revise my expectations a bit. Overall the sensor is great and works well. I just wish it had some more features around notifications. Also, my electrical panel is pretty small, so I couldn't place the box inside the panel as the instructions indicated. However, it seems to be ok sitting outside of it. If you're looking for detailed information on what's using power in your house, this is good starting point.

I installed an em16 pro in my home sub panel with the majority of my electric circuits. The install was fairly straight forward. I was able to get the connection to Home Assistant working with some difficulty. The integration for Refoss in the default repository is not correct for this version. After some back and forth with Refoss customer support I realized I needed to add the Refoss-Rpc integration. Once that was done on Home Assistant the Refoss device showed up immediately. The Refoss app is very basic and categorizes the panel input power as demand instead of supply from the grid. Customer supported told me this is an app bug and will be fixed in future firmware updates. Once I was connected to Home Assistant I was able to see clearly the power usage within the panel (both 120 & 240 circuits). Overall I'm very happy with the product and would purchase it again. In fact I have already bought a second unit for the main input panel on the side of the house. Looking forward to seeing dryer, hot water heater and garage usage. Customer support was very helpful and responses to my questions were overnight. This does require installation in your electrical panel. Please make sure you know what your doing and are careful. There's a ton of information on the net about how to do this. Mistakes though can be deadly...