Refoss Smart Home Energy Monitor, Accurate Real-Time Energy Consumption Tracking with Home Assistant, Electricity Usage Monitor with 16X Circuit Sensors

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!

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.

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 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 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.