Refoss Smart Home Energy Monitor with Open API, Home Assistant, No Cloud

I love this. My only regret is that there's not one that can handle an entire panel with 42 breakers. If there was a bigger one, I would buy it instantly - great value. Especially once you realize that you have random energy usage spikes and use this to help diagnose it. I have this set up with home assistant and everything just works and flows perfectly into the energy dashboard. Getting it all set up both in the panel and on the wifi was a breeze. One note, if you connect the clip before plugging it in, make sure you don't touch the metal tip or you're in for a shock.

I purchased this power monitor system specifically because it was advertised as a “No Cloud” system. My prior system stopped working when the company decided to shut down their cloud servers. I noticed that one reviewer said that this system actually did need the cloud to work, but what I found is that it needs internet access (to access a time server), but it didn’t try to contact any cloud servers as far as I could see. I found this out when I blocked it from accessing the internet at my firewall. When I did that, the system stopped working after a day or so. Once I looked at my firewall logs, I could see that it was trying to access a time server. Once I allowed it to access my DNS server, and a time (NTP) server, it started working again. Everything on the internet depends on DNS and NTP, so I’m not too concerned that these services will end anytime soon. I did notice that it was accessing a different NTP server about every hour, though. I thought this was odd, and they were all time servers I’ve never heard of. The system doesn’t use any of the popular NTP servers (NIST, ntp.org, etc). I also noticed that there was no provision to configure the NTP server in settings, so I created a “port forward” rule in my router that routes all NTP requests to an NTP server of my choice. The system has been working fine this way for a week or so now with no issues, and it’s blocked from accessing anything on the web except the time server I chose. Installation was about what you’d expect for this kind of system. You have to be comfortable working in your electrical panel to install it. If you don’t want to do that, you’ll have to get an electrician to install it. The hardware appears to be of good quality. None of it feels cheap, and pretty much everything is included that you’ll need. The software isn’t great, though. If you don’t use the app (and the cloud), you access it through it’s local web interface. There is real time data there, but you can’t really see any data older than about a half hour, making it pretty much useless. You’re supposed to be able to select day, week, month, etc., but that feature is buggy and doesn’t work. I ended up setting up a Home Assistant server. This took some time to figure out and get going, but it works much better than the native web interface. With Home Assistant, I can display power usage data on a graph, and move forward and backward in time as I please. The user interface isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than the native interface. Of course, you have to have an “always on” PC running Home Assistant somewhere on your local network for this to work. Over all I’m pleased with the system, although I think if you want a system that doesn’t depend on the cloud, it’s pretty much useless with only the native web interface. It only becomes useful when connected to a Home Assistant server, and that took a bit of tinkering to get going. You don’t have to be a total geek to do that, but it certainly helps.

I’ve been using the Refoss Smart Energy Monitor for a week now, and I’m thoroughly impressed. One of the standout features is its local integration with Home Assistant, which is precisely why I chose this energy monitor. The instructions were straightforward, and the video on the Amazon listing was particularly helpful, guiding me through the entire installation process. It should be relatively easy for anyone with basic electrical knowledge and some handy skills. However, I recommend doing some pre-planning before installation to determine which circuits you want to monitor. There are five L1 circuit sensor, five L2 circuits sensor, and six circuits sensor that can be used on either L1 or L2. You’ll need to choose one or the other. Additionally, you can combine some circuits and use one clamp for them, as long as they don’t exceed the current limit of the circuit sensor. For instance, I combined two kitchen outlets into one, saving me a sensor I used for monitoring a different. For balanced 240V loads like an AC unit or an EV charger, you can use one clamp and then change the circuit factor to 2 in the Refoss app or create a helper in Home Assistant that multiplies the energy usage by 2. This is because with balanced loads, the energy drawn on both lines is the same, which is why it’s called a balanced load. This way, you can save a sensor to monitor another circuit. I highly recommend making a note of which sensors are connected to which circuits to avoid wasting time trying to remember where you connected them. Setting up the energy monitor on the app was a breeze. I simply downloaded the Refoss app, followed its instructions to connect it to Wi-Fi, and updated the software of the energy monitoring module. The Refoss app allows you to monitor live energy usage for each connected circuit and view a history of energy usage for each circuit, broken down by day, week, month, and year which is awesome for using the app on its own. Connecting to Home Assistant was equally easy. I searched for the Refoss add-on, and the energy monitor was automatically detected on my network. It brought over all the entities shown in the Refoss app and then I got to setting up everything in home assistant. Overall, I highly recommend this affordable and reliable whole-house energy monitoring system. If you use Home Assistant, this is one of the best options out there that is supported natively through the Refoss addon.

I have 2 houses and I originally started with the Emporia Vue Gen 2 system (no longer available) in my first house so I was familiar with the installation process. It's basically identical for both systems. As others have mentioned, planning out your A and B phases and labeling will make the process go faster and smoother. The main difference in the installation between the Emporia and the Refoss is that the Vue does not make any reference to the A and B phases for the branch circuits but the Refoss does. Being that I only wanted a basic monitoring system for each circuit and for the entire house usage, I simply installed the sensors in order. Because I also have a standby generator, I needed a second unit for the generator subpanel. The components seem pretty much the same between both systems. Others mentioned that it was hard to get the sensors to snap closed, and while that is true at times, the Emporia system has the same issue. I imagine that the manufacturing process required to minimize the hinge tolerances so the snaps perfect align would make both products more expensive. Regardless, they do close, but sometimes it can get a little challenging as each additional sensor gives you a little less room for fingers. By the end the panel looks very busy for both systems. Others have noted that they installed the branch monitors in the proper direction but the readings were negative. I had that issue as well but luckily you simply have to change the multiplier to -1 in the app to correct it. The big difference in the products is the app. The Emporia app provides the data in a graph with live, minute, hour/day/week/month/year graphs. The data auto refreshes every second. The Refoss app gives you the live data, but the auto refresh is 5 seconds. It also gives day/week/month/year graphs but not hour. The Refoss app gives you more info on each circuit at a glance than Emporia, but that makes you have to scroll more to find the branches since fewer fit on the screen. It's a little less (no per hour) and slower (5 sec refresh vs 1 sec) info when you click on the branch circuit. Both apps have their pros and cons. Overall, I'm happy with the product. I had no problems with the installation and it does what I wanted it to do. Since it's new, I imagine Refoss has some updates and improvements pending for the app, but it's not bad as it is. It will give you some very detailed insight to what is using power and when and that can help you save money.

I wanted to get a device to monitor my home energy usage and after looking around and reading reviews I decided to give the Refoss EM-16 a try since it was on sale at the time. I live in the state of Illinois and our electric rates have gone up a lot this summer. While I've always been energy conscious, led lighting good insulation etc., there is only so much you can do. I've been interested in renewable energy, wind and solar, for about 30 yrs and while you can currently power your home off grid, if you're in the right location, it's going to cost you a pretty penny to do so. Not a viable option for me. So I wanted to see exactly where my power is being used the most. And the EM-16 tells me that exactly. I have done something a little different than other people have as I have 2 EM-16's monitoring my entire circuit panel. Like most people I have 240 volts incoming from the utility, 2 legs of 120 volts, 1 which is phase-A and the other which is phase-B, pretty common here in the U.S. The EM-16 has 18 "channels" 6 A channels, 6 B, and 6 C. Each group of channels has a wire for power and which breaker you connect it to determines which phase you're going to monitor. My circuit panel has space for 30 breakers, 15 on the A phase and 15 on the B phase. While I originally had my EM-16 wired up to monitor some of my breakers on both phases, I wanted to do them all. After understanding just how the EM-16 works I had the idea of combining all 3 of the channel power wires and connecting them to 1 phase of my panel. That way I could use 1 EM-16 to monitor my 15 A phase side breakers and another EM-16 to monitor the B phase side of my panel. So I emailed support and asked if my thinking on this was correct and they replied the next day and said yep you can do that. So I ordered another EM-16. I now have both wired up to my panel and I can monitor every single breaker I have. While you lose the ability to merge an A channel and B channel together for total power, that wasn't important to me, being able to monitor every breaker was. After I got it all setup I was going thru the house flipping lights on to determine which breaker they were on by watching the app while doing so. It helped me find a light switch which obviously has a short in it because lights normally don't use 500 watts of power. Didn't kick the breaker off so I would have not known about it without the EM-16. Going to have to get that checked out. I cannot recommend the EM-16 enough. The app is great, support is great, and their device does the job. You cannot go wrong with an EM-16 or 2 of them!

Pros: - Build quality is on par with other competing products - Initial wifi setup is easy with no drama - Local LAN Home Assistant integration works decent Cons: - Manual makes references to "two phase" power, which is not a real thing. They should be saying "Split Phase". - Many configuration options are missing in the app, such as defining the sensor load as 120 or 240, which means after the fact you need to correct the load in watts based on your branch voltage (IE, double if it's 240) - Home Assistant integration does not allow any configuration or way to rename the sensors. - Sensor orientation is labeled BACKWARDS for Home Assistant - meaning, if you follow the manual, all sensors will report current draw as a negative number, and a positive value for backfeed (grid tie solar for example). This is the EXACT OPPOSITE logic employed with Home Assistant's energy metering. So if you follow the manual, Home Assistant will think each device is feeding back to the grid instead of drawing power. You'll either have to flip 18 current clamps to the opposite direction, or add inversion logic to each entity, which is annoying and messy. - Accuracy is a problem. There are 3 voltage sense wires, and the clamps are divided into 3 groups, A, B, and C. With single phase panels, this means you're measuring L1 + L2 and have to land the third wire on either leg. This means if you land the Group C sense wire on L2, if you use a Group C sensor on L1, you will get an incorrect voltage which is going to affect your measured load. A better way to do this is to be able to assign a sense wire - Current clamps are limited in size, and there's no option to buy larger clamps to accommodate large gauge wires for long runs.

I'm taking a full 3 stars off because I bought this excitedly thinking it was geared towards people like me who wanted local control of their devices with no account, no internet. NOPE!!! The only way you can commission this to your wifi network is to: 1. download their app 2. agree to their terms of service 3. create account using email #1 I could MAYBE get over (you still rely on a working app 10 years in the future, which is unlikely), but not 2 and 3. And there is ZERO technical reason for needing an account to add the device. I feel scammed. If anyone knows how to commission these devices without their app, please write it in your review. If you buy this, you better keep the same network credentials for the next 30 years. (oh, and the manufacturer now probably knows your wifi password) ALSO: I'm like 99% sure it lies about the per-channel voltage. I only have a few clamps on right now, and get home assistant is reading slightly different values for every channel. I'm pretty sure the only voltage source is the power feed wires themselves, so it's just applying a random offset to each to make it look like something is happening.

Mostly does what it claims, if you read and understand the fine print. Overall, the install was about 2 hours, but there wasn't enough room in the bottom of the breaker panel for the box to fit. I ended up putting it near the top, but had to use a separate wifi antenna extension cable. Also, the instructions lead you to put the CT's on backwards. Other reviews mentioned getting them backwards, so I was super careful to follow the directions. All of the CT's reported negative values and needed to be flipped over. The meter has 18 CT's, but they are split over 3 phases. Since US consumer power is pretty much all 2 phase, this means you have to pick one of the 2 phases for your last set of 6 CT's. Basically, you get 6 CT's on one phase and 12 on the other, making actually using all 18 CT's really difficult. I ended up just prioritizing my 240V loads with this meter, and using zigbee smart plugs to measure 120V loads instead. There are a bunch of unused CT's still sitting in the box because I can't effectively use them to measure anything interesting. Power, voltage, and energy metrics all look reasonable (e.g. ~4600W on my hot water heater rated for 4500W), but current is often obviously wrong at low power draws. For example, it claims my heat pump is drawing ~32W at idle, but somehow also pulling 5A at 240V, which is just laughably wrong. I confirmed other people have the same issue by looking at their app screen shots. If you do the math, the numbers often don't add up. Higher loads seem better for some reason. I don't use the app (which seemed mediocre at best). I have a custom influx/grafana setup where I put all my other metrics, so I reverse engineered the Refoss Home Assistant integration off of github and wrote my own bit of software to poll the device via http (search for refoss_ha; userkey is "meross" by default). The protocol is vastly over complicated, but I did get it working. I had to hard reset the device multiple times, once by physically pulling the power because the reset button wasn't affective. I was also annoyed to find out recently that there is apparently an improved EM16P being launched "soon", which is supposed to make the software integration reasonable. Well, it's installed and technically working so I'm not going to rip it out, but that doesn't feel great.

Vraiment très bien. L'interface de contrôle est simple et facile d'utilisation. Il se connecte en wifi. Il est compatible avec le triphasé. Il y a bien 6 modules qui mesure l'intensité. Il est en plus compatible avec home assistant donc j'ai toutes les infos qui remontent ! Je recommande.

Inizio col dire che sono molto soddisfatto del prodotto. Si tratta di uno smart energy monitor dotato di sei pinze amperometriche che permette di monitorare i consumi di casa in maniera precisa, da utilizzare con l'app refoss oppure tramite interfaccia web sulla rete di casa; è facilmente integrabile anche con Home Assistant tramite MQTT. La differenza tra la versione EM6 e la EM6P sta nel fatto che la seconda permette di disabilitare il cloud per controllare i consumi in locale, senza doversi collegare ad internet (cosa da me molto apprezzata). E' possibile collegarlo in impianti monofase, bifase e trifase: io ho un impianto monofase (come la maggior parte degli impianti casalinghi in Italia). Facile l'installazione, ma se non siete pratici e visto che bisogna mettere mano al pannello elettrico generale rivolgetevi ad un professionista! Il manuale è comunque chiaro e tutti i cavi sono etichettati: difficile sbagliare. Si monta su barra DIN. La potenza massima è di 120 ampere per singola linea: più che sufficiente, però comporta il fatto che le pinze siano leggermete più grandi e quindi un po' scomode da piazzare in pannelli con poco spazio. Le sei pinze vanno messe attorno alla fase del circuito che si vuole misurare seguendo il flusso della corrente come indicato, altrimenti la lettura verrà indicata in negativo (girare la pinza oppune moltiplicare per -1 nell'interfaccia web). E' possibile far passare due o più cavi nella pinza per avere la somma dei consumi su tutti i cavi: importante mettere tutte fasi. Nel monitoraggio fornisce anche il fattore di potenza, molto utile, che non tutti gli energy monitor forniscono. Ho provato a misurare i consumi con un misuratore da applicare direttamente ad una presa di corrente e devo dire che i risultati coincidono con uno scarto di circa l'1%. In conclusione mi sento di consigliare il prodotto a chi vuole monitorare i propri consumi. Il prodotto è molto buono, possiede tutte le certificazioni di sicurezza necessarie. Il fatto che possa monitorare fino a 6 circuiti, che sia installabile in impianti dal monofase al trifase, che sia utilizzabile completamente in locale senza essere collegato al cloud credo lo renda interessante anche in ambienti professionali oltre che casalinghi. Avevo già acquistato prodotti Meross/Refoss e devo dire che sono prodotti di ottima qualità.

After reading some online reviews I bought the Refoss smart energy monitor to help monitor my homes energy usage and my modest solar power production. It really exceeded my expectations. Out of the box it is impressive, feels quite solid to hold, the power and CT connections click in well and hold firmly in place. The software installation and getting the unit online was uneventful. The included Quick setup was easy to follow. The data provided by both the phone app and the WebUI is quite nice, has live and running totals of different time periods. Simple settings to combine channels for 240v systems and to tune for power factor where necessary. On the WebUI the graph is a nice touch. It also integrates well, with an official integration, in my Home Assistant setup. Physical installation was straight forward but I highly recommend consulting a professional to install it as it requires accessing the inside of your mains panel and one mistake in there can really ruin your day! After about 2 months I had an issue with it keeping connected to my Wifi and I reached out to Refoss Tech support. The support was beyond good. The support tech replied within 24 hours and over the course of a few days we went through troubleshooting, testing and checking logs to rule out the possibility of one of my devices causing issue. Mia, who was assigned to my ticket, was very informative and knowledgeable. She was able to quickly see the problem, suggest solutions and share the results of what we tried. Once she was able to confirm the device had developed a hardware fault she quickly had a new replacement unit shipped to me. I cant express how happy I was with the support I received. Things are mass produced so there are always some defects in everything and its nice to know the company you bought from cares about the product and its customers.

Super. Schnelle Installation, funktioniert einwandfrei, liefert Daten wie beschrieben.

La verdad es que me ha sorprendido para bien. Lo compré porque quería controlar varios consumos de casa a la vez, sobre todo aerotermia, cargador del coche y parte de la instalación solar, y el hecho de que tenga 6 canales es justo lo que necesitaba. Normalmente casi todos los medidores de este tipo se quedan cortos con 2 o 3, así que en ese sentido está muy bien pensado. La instalación requiere entretenerse un poco si no estás acostumbrado a este tipo de aparatos, pero una vez montado funciona muy bien. Lo que más me gusta es que da datos bastante detallados y en tiempo real, y además puedes verlos desde la interfaz web local, que para mí es un puntazo porque no dependes solo de la app ni de la nube. También valoro mucho que tenga MQTT, API abierta y WebSocket, porque así se puede integrar con Home Assistant sin tener que andar haciendo inventos raros. En mi caso era algo importante y cumple. Se nota que no es el típico aparato cerrado. Otro punto positivo es que permite exportar datos en CSV y guardar histórico bastante amplio sin pagar suscripciones, que hoy en día parece que todo te lo quieren cobrar aparte. Eso me parece un acierto total. Como pega, diría que no es un producto “para cualquiera” si buscas algo totalmente plug and play. Si no te manejas un poco con electricidad o domótica, igual necesitas ayuda para sacarle todo el partido. Pero si sabes lo que compras, está muy bien. En general, muy buena compra por el precio. Completo, flexible y con opciones de integración que no suelen verse en este rango. Lo volvería a comprar.