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

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!

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...

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.

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.

This product fulfills its main promise, which is to be a Home Assistant-compatible energy monitor. It does that, and does it well. But some physical design choices stand in the way of a five-star review. It's just too hard to fit this product into a typical electrical panel. We have a Square D Homeline panel with 30 breaker slots, about 20 of which are populated. Here are the reasons why it won't fit: - The cables on the two main CTs are just barely long enough to reach from the top of the panel to the bottom. This severely restricts the position of the main orange box. - The box's power cable has a surprisingly thick and inflexible connector. This adds about two inches to the height of the box in an already cramped environment. - To fully use the product, you must add plugs along three of its sides. This effectively makes the box several inches taller and wider than the specifications state. I tried to work around these sizing challenges by adding a 1-inch flexible conduit and an external junction box for the EM16 to free up more space in the main panel. This was an exercise in frustration. I knew it would be difficult to get 19 cables (power, 2 main CTs, 16 branch CTs) through the conduit, but the 90-degree plugs on the CTs make it impossible. I'm now investigating thin audio extension cables as a workaround. Refoss should have used straight plugs, or else provided extension cables more suitable for those of who need to pull wires through conduit. The thick power connector is also completely unsuitable for pulling. Another poor design choice is to put the box's status LED on the opposite side of the port labels. You will almost certainly install the box with the labels facing toward you, which means that post-installation you won't be able to see the LED that tells you whether the box is working. I was able to install only the two main CTs and two branch CTs before reaching the limit of what would fit, so I have 14 unused channels. I could add a second conduit or replace the 1-inch conduit with a larger one, but I can spend only so much time on this project. I wish Refoss had designed for more installation scenarios by reducing the profile of the fully-loaded box, and by making it more compatible with installation through conduit.

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!

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.

Overall a good product after monitoring for a few hours. The app could be more user friendly and organized a bit better. Like some others have said some sensors are wired backwards and will give you a negative value even if installed correctly but is easily overcome with the circuit factor. About half of mine were wired incorrectly. I wish the pig tails were a bit longer to give more options on where to mount the receiver but overall installation was very easy. So far so good, the product is giving me lots of information about energy consumption like it was designed to do. Would recommend

After using this product for about 2 weeks, I can say that I'm very happy with it. It is easy to clip around your power cables, just make sure to have a multimeter or something to test that you are clipping at the correct one. (my installation had lots of colours mismatch). After installing, the Refoss app will automatically recognize it and install it, you will then be able to properly name your transformers and set a multiplier factor (i.e. negative if you clipped it reverted or a greater number if you ran out of transformers and want to estimate a double or triple phase). You can also give a estimated cost/kwh, set consumption alert per transformer, merge channels (i.e. 1 view for a 220v appliance were you clipped a transformer on both phases). I recommend it.

I self installed this on my 200amp panel and it works very well. Installation was straightforward as long as you’re comfortable doing work inside the panel (make sure the power is off!). It’s been really useful to see where unexpected power draws are coming from, such as a heater in one of my adult children’s rooms that I did not know about! Recommended for all who enjoy having details of what’s happening in their house.

I'm very happy with the EM 16. It does everything I was hoping it would. Install was easy. It took max 30 minutes once I got started. The app connected without issue. I installed all circuits as called out in the instructions but some circuits were showing negative power (as in energy flowing back to the grid) which was definitely not correct. I think that has more to do with my house but either way there are 2 ways to fix that. Either flip the clamp or set the power factor to -1 in the app which is essentially the same as physically flipping the clamp. The Home Assistant integration is great. There's almost no setup to connect it. The integration is native so when I added it to Home Assistant it connected itself to the EM16 without any additional inputs. Tips: - Install is really simple, power off to the whole house, connect the WiFi antenna, connect the power lead directly to a circuit, attached the clamps. - Do some planning before install. Consider which circuits should be monitored if you have more than 16. I wrote it out on excel first which made revisions before I started the install easy. It also made it easy to rename the circuits in the app after setup was complete - Mark the circuits you've planned on the breakers since the circuit numbers won't be visible when the panel cover is taken off. - There are 3 types of clamps, A, B, and C. A and B clamps need to be on different phases. C clamps need to adopt either the A phase or the B phase but they can't be on both. On North American panels, generally, each row of circuits (assuming the panel is oriented with the long edge vertically) is on a single phase. That means starting at the top of the panel and working down each row alternates phases. The photo with the panel cover is after the install. Apart from an antenna there’s no sign of the EM16.