EnergyCloud - Home Energy Monitor (No Electrician Required)

I am upgrading my review of Power Cost Monitor from 2 stars to 5 stars. In a way the product is unique. If you want to monitor your energy usage, there are different options available. You can use small devices like kill a watt, or you can try to monitor your whole house. Most of the choices in that category are either difficult to install or very difficult to install, and they would require you working inside of your electrical panel. This product does not require any of that – you simply attach it on your meter, and it would monitor the energy use by either watching the wheel rotation (on analog model) or by monitoring RF frequency coming from a digital meter.I am upgrading my review because even though I ran into several issues initially, I managed to resolve them and with the help of the monitor was able to determine two energy hogging devices in my house which didn’t have to be working 24x7, which will reduce the energy bill for about $50, so device will pay for itself in 4 months. Also, for a long time I was blaming pump motor for being so inefficient, the device had proved quickly that it is not the motor that consumes most of the energy in my home.I haven’t seen the “AI” features yet, which supposedly would recognize the devices in my house and would show the energy consumption by device.The setup is easy if you know what to do. There are several “gotchas” which I recommend to be aware of to have a successful setup:- Watch instruction videos, and not those that are recommended by the instructions but those that are on the company web site;- If you want your connector to work over wifi, do the setup on a device that has wifi (i.e. iPad, computer with wifi card);- Instructions refer to “reset” button on the sensor, I had 2 different brand new sensors, on both the “reset” button did not work. But you can simply take out battery, it seems that it works the same as resetting through the button;- When setting up on an analog meter, have the little white mark lined up with the rotation wheel (one of the pictures shows it pointing perpendicular to the disk which is wrong);Also, be prepared for the following:- The readings are not accurate, the seem to be an aggregation of the 15 sec intervals, and obviously on an analog meter they are even less accurate.- The readings are not instantaneous, data is going into cloud first then back to you, and uploads are happening at 30 sec intervals and there is also seem to be some processing happening on the cloud, so delay could be 1-2 minutes;- It seems that on an iPad there is no way to remember your credentials (login/password), not sure whether it is Apple issue, or Safari, or something else. You can use “EnergyCloud” app instead.- I would have preferred the sensor to not have the battery but rather have some kind of a hookup to the meter itself which makes the device maintenance free, but I do understand why this choice was made – so that you could install device and not ever have to have to access inside of your electric panel. But maybe company can figure out a solar charger, that would work pretty well for places like California?- The artificial intelligence that was supposed to recognize all devices in the home is way off. Maybe it cannot recognize my multi-staging AC which takes more than 80% of my energy bill.

This product seemed very cool and useful with tracking energy use for my home. Bought if for its easy install (no electrician needed) and cool statistics on the website and app. It was a tedious process to set up via WI-FI. I had constant error messages and back-end problems. Finally, the second day it started to read my meter. Customer service is primarily through e-mail, so expect a 12 hour delay in all your responses and solutions. After 4 days of reading the meter, things were going great. I was enjoying logging on and seeing my energy usage. Then on the 5th day, the company sent out a update for the firmware in their cloud connector. This sent things into a downward spiral. I was constantly disconnected. I went back and forth with customer service and resetting, restarting and reconnecting the meter reader to the cloud connector. Then, they admitted that the firmware they sent out was UNTESTED and it created a bug in the cloud connector. So they tried to fix things up on their backend. This went on for a week!! So no readings were being displayed. Emails were sent that the problem was put on Amazon Web Services and a resolution was being worked on. 2 more days go by. My patience grew thin. I finally decided that I did not want to be inconvenienced with a product that cost me close to $200 and showed me no value for the investment. I repackaged in and sent it back before the refund date. My advice to you is keep an eye on your return window date. This product is VERY BUGGY and UNRELIABLE.

Hardware seems to be solid, much better than the previous versions.Setup was pretty easy; however, I had some problems with sensor wireless range.Originally, I wanted to use it wired (ethernet) but the sensor signal was too weak (going through brick wall, about 20ft) so I had to settle for Wi-Fi. I like the dashboard, a huge improvement over old Plotwatt.Also, I like the API that lets me access my data programmatically with a simple script.Overall, a good successor with great potential.Like:- new sensor design (with C battery)- new Cloud Connector (with ethernet and Wi-Fi)- dashboard- API to access data from the cloudDon't like:- sensor range too short- API doesn't let me access readings locally like the previous version.11/12/2018I also experienced October server meltdown. Got a replacement with updated software but unfortunately the CloudConnector must be power cycled daily (sometimes more often) to keep pushing data to BL servers.At this point it is really useless... Will review again if I can get at least one week without needing reboot.11/16/2018Well, in an unexpected turn of events, my EnergyCloud account has been disabled and my API key is no longer valid... No communication or explanation from support - very strange.I guess it doesn't matter since the CloudConnector freezes frequently and has to be rebooted daily.