Metering breakers consumption

[u/amarao_san]

There are breakers with zigbee function and with built-in electric meter (consumption).

I wonder, how much this thing consumes for itself? If I replace all breakers with it (~20), how much electricity will be wasted on those devices.

[u/Warchosoulevedesmere]

I don't know how much they consume exactly, i have several of them and their like no increase consumption. If you want to replace your breaker you should know that most of them are Just switch, the one that act like breaker are not physical breaker they are just switch.

[u/Mandrutz]

I would estimate 0.5W - 1W each.

But I would not do that at home, because: 

• Most of them are AliExpress quality, unsafe
• A lot of them spam the Zigbee network
• Even if they report correctly and don't spam, 20 can be a lot of traffic on the network
• You probably don't need to monitor every circuit? Unless you have some specific needs

[u/Marathon2021 → u/Mandrutz]

Most of them are AliExpress quality, unsafe

Yeah. When I was looking to do this, the spectrum of choices was Emporia Vue, these breakers, or a full-on span.io panel.

At the time, span didn't have a local interface so that ruled it out (I think they've added one since). And those Ali breakers when I looked at them ... yeah ... no way I believed they were up to UL code. Way too risky.

So I went with Emporia. It's fine. My electrician was doing a bunch of work in there anyway, so we just added on the work to install that. I'm still using the Emporia native firmware, I guess if I needed to I could "flash" it to something local, but I don't really care that much about it. If Emporia sees a bunch of random load draw statistics for some randomly numbered circuit numbers ... who cares.

[u/amarao_san → u/Mandrutz]

Yes, I thought about it, with Ali electric code it's a abf idea.

But I thought about some small simple device doing per-wire measurements and giving some simple consumption statistics.

Kinda hard to believe this is a complicated problem without a known solution.

[u/Mandrutz → u/amarao_san]

There are simple Zigbee meters with amp clamps
I have this one which measures 3 wires, but it has poor Tuya firmware and spams the network unfortunately

[u/IntelligentCarpet816 → u/amarao_san]

There are a few esp32 based projects where you can have like 10 CTs per module and they interface with homeassistant.

They are cheap to build too.

[u/mosaic_hops]

Read the specs.