Emporia EVSE and Vue Gen2 Review

[ResidualJinx]

Hello Everybody,

I just recently had my Emporia EVSE and a Vue Gen2 installed in my home and wanted to give some initial impressions. Of note, I bought this with my own money, and I not sponsored or affiliated with Emporia... although @EmporiaEnergy hit me up, I'm down to test out y'all V2X and give detailed feedback!! lol

For those that are unaware, Emporia's claim to fame is the Vue monitoring system which uses inductive hall sensors to track electricity usage for your home. My system came with 16 sensors for individual circuits and sensors for the incoming mains from the electric service provider, which means I had to prioritize which made the most sense to capture most of our home's usage. First off, I think it's a pretty sharp looking EVSE, but I do wish it had a more integrated holster. I really wanted this system installed outside since my truck would never fit inside my garage and with brand new community we're fighting the wilderness trying to get back to its old home. Unlike other EVSE's it does not have a locking mechanism but my electrician said, the combination of the special key included in the kit and the fact that the screws enter from the back near the wall, a potential thief would have an interesting time getting it off.

As for the EVSE's intended function it's a 48 amp system (when hardwired, 40 if using the included plug), which is giving me about 12 kwh to the truck, and it does that just fine. The sensors are doing a fantastic job of tracking usage across the home. I think the hardware is amazing, this system's shortfall is for sure it's app, and where I'm going to spend some time complaining lol

On it's face the app isn't terrible and could even be great with some changes. One of the awesome pieces is the range of time increments available, but with that you cant decide a scope of time. What I mean by that is I select hour, I cant make it so I only view the last 10 hours, it has a preset scope and can't zoom in and out. So those increments have hardset scopes of time.

The charger does have 3 main functions which is schedules, peak demand and excess solar. The main selling function for me was the excess solar concept and the one I'm least impressed by. Granted I've had the whole thing installed for a grand total of 2 days and I'm not physically located with the system. Plus there is an install error, where the hall sensor for my solar wasn't installed properly and it's not reading the incoming productivity. With those caveats out of the way it doesn't work like I thought it would lmao. The app is able to change the amperage the system is sending to the truck but I guess what I envisioned is I'd tell it hey I tend to make extra solar power, why don't you figure out how much that is and send it to the truck instead of the grid but that's not the case. It will just turn the charger on if you're making excess solar, but turning it off and generating excess solar didn't turn it on. I'll post an update once I have the solar sensor corrected, hoping that's the issue!

In Southern California, more specifically with SCE, we are charged on "Time of Use" rates which means we pay more for electricity during certain periods of the day, and this worked pretty cool in that I was able to quickly find my provider and the plan, adjust my schedule for on/off charging and then provide rates.

You can change the unit of measure, so in conjunction with the rates I just mentioned you can view your usage in dollars, which is a great way to budget against purchasing gasoline.

Emporia uses an API called SmartCar to connect with our Lightning and give some basic information on the state of charge of our Lightnings. Here I find another complaint, in that its just informational. This is where it should be able to shine, because I would hope that I could limit the amount of charge sent to the truck with this integration but there are no such capability. SmartCar is capable of so much more, for anyone that's ever used Turo a crowd based car rental app similar to AirBnB but for cars, Turo uses SmartCar for it's integration capability. However, that is not the case, instead of turning off the charging or anything further, it just tells me if the truck is connected and it's state of charge.

Even with the sensor on the solar system not installed correctly, the sensors on the mains are able to pick up the fact that during some portions of the day I'm generating more then I'm using. As such it's able to tell me how much went to the truck instead of going to the grid.

All in all, I'm a huge fan of the hardware, I just hope that Emporia is able to improve the user experience and automation baked into the app. I want it to know the state of charge, the previous day's over generation and potentially weather call, use those items in conjunction and attempt to limit it's charging to only what I'm sending back to the grid until I override it and tell, nah just top me off. I also NEED APIs into other home automation tools like Google Home, Amazon Alexia or Apple's Homekit, or other home control apps for simple IFITT or more complicated automations.

If anyone has any questions please let me know... I dont do these often so I probably rambled a ton and didn't hit import stuff. Anyone who has these two and know how to make it any better let me know.

I'm going to try to incorporate some cool hacks folks have been working (python) (automation) (HACS) and maybe do my own thing but that wont be for some time.

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[vandy1981]

Thanks for the review--I've been interested in hearing how the system works with the solar monitoring and EVSE components.

Does it support multiple EVSEs? Is the system capable of load shedding?

 

[metroshot]

Wow, that was way more info than I have seen!

I only use the total kWh used per month for $ calculations.

We have one in the garage shared between 2 vehicles and both charge at off peak times (TOU). $0.21/kWh is what we aim for.

I have noticed that it has kept full charge rates in the heat of summer months which is amazing because hearing the FoMoCo chargers often scale back or shut down charging in 115+ degree weather.

Thanks for the great info and hope @EmporiaEnergy will improve on their app as well as the new V2X which I am looking forward to...

 

[ResidualJinx]

Thanks for the review--I've been interested in hearing how the system works with the solar monitoring and EVSE components.

Does it support multiple EVSEs? Is the system capable of load shedding?

I don't know tbh, but with the physical ability to modulate the amperage delivery to the truck it's capable of load sheading in theory. The only limitation would be if the app can do it.

 

[ResidualJinx]

Wow, that was way more info than I have seen!

I only use the total kWh used per month for $ calculations.

We have one in the garage shared between 2 vehicles and both charge at off peak times (TOU). $0.21/kWh is what we aim for.

I have noticed that it has kept full charge rates in the heat of summer months which is amazing because hearing the FoMoCo chargers often scale back or shut down charging in 115+ degree weather.

Thanks for the great info and hope @EmporiaEnergy will improve on their app as well as the new V2X which I am looking forward to...

I was thinking exactly the same thing, if they're going to pull off V2X, they're going to need to make this whole experience much better but if I had a choice I'd prefer fantastic hardware over fantastic app. The charger has not had once issue, which is a very big deal to us, and a major reason why we didn't install the FCSP. As long as they make incremental improvements to the UI, and a couple of big revisions incorporating user feedback it could make this a great alternative option!

 

[Pioneer74]

If anyone has any questions please let me know... I dont do these often so I probably rambled a ton and didn't hit import stuff. Anyone who has these two and know how to make it any better let me know.

I don't know if you can answer this or not, or maybe @EmporiaEnergy can chime in.

I already have an Emporia charger and will continue to use it with my wife's Mach-E. I'm contemplating installing my FCSP when it arrives to guarantee I can fully charge my Lightning overnight during my power companies "Super Off Peak" times during the winter. I want to install Vue Gen2 to monitor my panel, and more importantly the FCSP, because as others have posted, the data isn't very good.

I see the sensors that come with the Vue2 are 200a for the mains, and 50A for the circuits. Have you seen any indication that the individual sensors can be used on loads over 50 amps, or can another set of main sensors can be purchased to monitor bigger loads?

 

[ResidualJinx]

I don't know if you can answer this or not, or maybe @EmporiaEnergy can chime in.

I already have an Emporia charger and will continue to use it with my wife's Mach-E. I'm contemplating installing my FCSP when it arrives to guarantee I can fully charge my Lightning overnight during my power companies "Super Off Peak" times during the winter. I want to install Vue Gen2 to monitor my panel, and more importantly the FCSP, because as others have posted, the data isn't very good.

I see the sensors that come with the Vue2 are 200a for the mains, and 50A for the circuits. Have you seen any indication that the individual sensors can be used on loads over 50 amps, or can another set of main sensors can be purchased to monitor bigger loads?

Here's what Emporia says about your latter question:

I wouldn't know off the top of my head about the 50 amp on larger circuits but one thing I failed to mention earlier is Emporia FANTASTIC customer service, they are super quick to respond and I would highly recommend reaching out to them direct.

Another super interesting thing that I didn't mention above is if you have a circuit that uses double pulls like your AC or a FCSP, you only need to monitor one line, and there is a multiplier function within the app that allows you to calculate the usage appropriately (2x multiplier for a double pull, 3x multiplier for a triple pull, etc). So I guess if one line is only carrying half the amperage of the FCSP then you should be fine to monitor because even if you put it on an 100 amp circuit the one line would only be carrying 50 amps. Again contact their customer service, they'll be able to answer definitively, I do not understand electricity all that well... I just stayed at a holiday inn express is all!

 

[GarageMahal]

I see the sensors that come with the Vue2 are 200a for the mains, and 50A for the circuits. Have you seen any indication that the individual sensors can be used on loads over 50 amps, or can another set of main sensors can be purchased to monitor bigger loads?

It looks like Emporia recommends adding another complete Vue setup to monitor large loads.

https://community.emporiaenergy.com/topic/100a-sensor/

...the Vue and Expansion Module are unable to detect the amperage range of the clamp plugged into its port; therefore, we only offer the 200A sensors (only meant to be plugged into the 3 main ports of the Vue) and the 50A sensors (only meant to be plugged into the Expansion Module). Using the 200A or any other amperage other than 50A in the Expansion Module will cause the readings to be of by the factor of the difference. i.e. a 100A would be off by a factor of 2.
So, your options are:

• If you don’t think you are pulling over 50A on that circuit, use the large diameter clamp you referenced with the Expansion Module.
• If you do think you are pulling over 50A, your only option would be to purchase another Vue. You can associate as many Vues as you like to a single account and view them in the app.

 

[EmporiaEnergy]

@ResidualJinx

Thanks for the detailed notes, feedback and pictures!

Always great to hear in-depth reviews like this and the team very much enjoyed reading your thoughts about the product and platform. Hopefully we can provide a bit of clarity into how some of those features work, what we're working on now to improve, as well as what will be coming in the future. First, sounds like the hardware itself is functioning fairly well overall - glad that is working like it should so most of this reply will be focused on the app and management features.

For the "Excess Solar Management" functionality - a few important pointers:

1.) Time of Use and Scheduling will override any Excess Solar enabled features, so having both managing the charger will reduce the surface area of available Excess Solar management to charge only during your off-peak times.

2.) The key about the monitor is ensuring that the 200A CTs are placed in a correct position on your main lines so that they can see grid power coming from one direction and backfed solar coming from the other. As long as you're seeing your Net Usage/Net Production change within the app (between blue/green numbers and values) then these should be working appropriately. These are the measurements that control the behavior of the Excess Solar Management, not related to monitoring the actual solar production from the inverter.

3.) You'll want to make sure your Emporia Level 2 Smart Home EV Charger is in a "Paused" state outside of the managed behavior. If the charger is left in a "Ready" state - then it will start charging as soon as a vehicle is plugged in, leaving it in "Paused" will allow for automated control to take over.

Ideally, whenever the Emporia Gen 2 Vue Energy Monitor detects Net Production (via the 200A CT's on the mains) - it should turn on the charger and increase the current/amperage and charge rate to consume the excess generated power. Will also decrease and turn off the charger as the amount of excess produced solar is also decreasing. If that behavior isn't happening, we can check for diagnostic details on all devices and figure out the issue from the Customer Support team.

SmartCar is one of our newest app additions having been released within the past few months. Still very early stages as you've pointed out - but planning on adding more functionality for those integrations moving forward. Things like you've suggested as well as "charge my battery to xyz% capacity" and more will be available as we improve that integration.

API? This is also something we'd also like to add in the future. Before we have an official API launched, we recommend using some of the open source projects built by customers that can act as an unofficial API.

Here's some links to a few examples of those projects:
https://github.com/helgew/emporia-downloader
https://pypi.org/project/pyemvue/
https://github.com/magico13/ha-emporia-vue
https://github.com/jertel/vuegraf

Overall we appreciate all the feedback! We're building up the team in a pretty significant fashion right now, and our goal is to bolster our development capacity to start bringing more of these features online sooner.

Keep an eye out for a bunch of improvements coming over the course of the next few months and years. We have a lot of things on the roadmap to tackle.

Always welcome to thoughts and suggestions however you'd like to communicate them with the team. Thanks!

Hello Everybody,

I just recently had my Emporia EVSE and a Vue Gen2 installed in my home and wanted to give some initial impressions. Of note, I bought this with my own money, and I not sponsored or affiliated with Emporia... although @EmporiaEnergy hit me up, I'm down to test out y'all V2X and give detailed feedback!! lol

For those that are unaware, Emporia's claim to fame is the Vue monitoring system which uses inductive hall sensors to track electricity usage for your home. My system came with 16 sensors for individual circuits and sensors for the incoming mains from the electric service provider, which means I had to prioritize which made the most sense to capture most of our home's usage. First off, I think it's a pretty sharp looking EVSE, but I do wish it had a more integrated holster. I really wanted this system installed outside since my truck would never fit inside my garage and with brand new community we're fighting the wilderness trying to get back to its old home. Unlike other EVSE's it does not have a locking mechanism but my electrician said, the combination of the special key included in the kit and the fact that the screws enter from the back near the wall, a potential thief would have an interesting time getting it off.

As for the EVSE's intended function it's a 48 amp system (when hardwired, 40 if using the included plug), which is giving me about 12 kwh to the truck, and it does that just fine. The sensors are doing a fantastic job of tracking usage across the home. I think the hardware is amazing, this system's shortfall is for sure it's app, and where I'm going to spend some time complaining lol

On it's face the app isn't terrible and could even be great with some changes. One of the awesome pieces is the range of time increments available, but with that you cant decide a scope of time. What I mean by that is I select hour, I cant make it so I only view the last 10 hours, it has a preset scope and can't zoom in and out. So those increments have hardset scopes of time.

The charger does have 3 main functions which is schedules, peak demand and excess solar. The main selling function for me was the excess solar concept and the one I'm least impressed by. Granted I've had the whole thing installed for a grand total of 2 days and I'm not physically located with the system. Plus there is an install error, where the hall sensor for my solar wasn't installed properly and it's not reading the incoming productivity. With those caveats out of the way it doesn't work like I thought it would lmao. The app is able to change the amperage the system is sending to the truck but I guess what I envisioned is I'd tell it hey I tend to make extra solar power, why don't you figure out how much that is and send it to the truck instead of the grid but that's not the case. It will just turn the charger on if you're making excess solar, but turning it off and generating excess solar didn't turn it on. I'll post an update once I have the solar sensor corrected, hoping that's the issue!

In Southern California, more specifically with SCE, we are charged on "Time of Use" rates which means we pay more for electricity during certain periods of the day, and this worked pretty cool in that I was able to quickly find my provider and the plan, adjust my schedule for on/off charging and then provide rates.

You can change the unit of measure, so in conjunction with the rates I just mentioned you can view your usage in dollars, which is a great way to budget against purchasing gasoline.

Emporia uses an API called SmartCar to connect with our Lightning and give some basic information on the state of charge of our Lightnings. Here I find another complaint, in that its just informational. This is where it should be able to shine, because I would hope that I could limit the amount of charge sent to the truck with this integration but there are no such capability. SmartCar is capable of so much more, for anyone that's ever used Turo a crowd based car rental app similar to AirBnB but for cars, Turo uses SmartCar for it's integration capability. However, that is not the case, instead of turning off the charging or anything further, it just tells me if the truck is connected and it's state of charge.

Even with the sensor on the solar system not installed correctly, the sensors on the mains are able to pick up the fact that during some portions of the day I'm generating more then I'm using. As such it's able to tell me how much went to the truck instead of going to the grid.

All in all, I'm a huge fan of the hardware, I just hope that Emporia is able to improve the user experience and automation baked into the app. I want it to know the state of charge, the previous day's over generation and potentially weather call, use those items in conjunction and attempt to limit it's charging to only what I'm sending back to the grid until I override it and tell, nah just top me off. I also NEED APIs into other home automation tools like Google Home, Amazon Alexia or Apple's Homekit, or other home control apps for simple IFITT or more complicated automations.

If anyone has any questions please let me know... I dont do these often so I probably rambled a ton and didn't hit import stuff. Anyone who has these two and know how to make it any better let me know.

I'm going to try to incorporate some cool hacks folks have been working (python) (automation) (HACS) and maybe do my own thing but that wont be for some time.

 

[EmporiaEnergy]

The 50A sensors and 2.5mm (side) ports will report accurately with high resolution between 0.04A – 75A (5W – 9000W). When you go below 0.04A, the readings will show ~0W. If you exceed 75A the sensors and ports will reach saturation and will not report anything higher. Going above 75A does not pose any risk of damage to the device or sensors.

I don't know if you can answer this or not, or maybe @EmporiaEnergy can chime in.

I already have an Emporia charger and will continue to use it with my wife's Mach-E. I'm contemplating installing my FCSP when it arrives to guarantee I can fully charge my Lightning overnight during my power companies "Super Off Peak" times during the winter. I want to install Vue Gen2 to monitor my panel, and more importantly the FCSP, because as others have posted, the data isn't very good.

I see the sensors that come with the Vue2 are 200a for the mains, and 50A for the circuits. Have you seen any indication that the individual sensors can be used on loads over 50 amps, or can another set of main sensors can be purchased to monitor bigger loads?

 

[EmporiaEnergy]

Thanks for the review--I've been interested in hearing how the system works with the solar monitoring and EVSE components.

Does it support multiple EVSEs? Is the system capable of load shedding?

You can check out our energy management functions here this explains how the Emporia Gen 2 Vue Energy Monitor and the EVSE work together to maximize excess solar.

At this time we do not support load sharing, but that is something we certainly have in consideration for future enhancement.

The Gen 2 Vue is capable of net metering solar generation. The 200A sensors that are included with the device are directional and can measure any energy that is generated in excess of your consumption.

 

[Pioneer74]

The 50A sensors and 2.5mm (side) ports will report accurately with high resolution between 0.04A – 75A (5W – 9000W). When you go below 0.04A, the readings will show ~0W. If you exceed 75A the sensors and ports will reach saturation and will not report anything higher. Going above 75A does not pose any risk of damage to the device or sensors.

Thank you for answering this question. I would rather have one main Vue2 than 2.

 

[ResidualJinx]

@ResidualJinx

Thanks for the detailed notes, feedback and pictures!

Always great to hear in-depth reviews like this and the team very much enjoyed reading your thoughts about the product and platform. Hopefully we can provide a bit of clarity into how some of those features work, what we're working on now to improve, as well as what will be coming in the future. First, sounds like the hardware itself is functioning fairly well overall - glad that is working like it should so most of this reply will be focused on the app and management features.

For the "Excess Solar Management" functionality - a few important pointers:

1.) Time of Use and Scheduling will override any Excess Solar enabled features, so having both managing the charger will reduce the surface area of available Excess Solar management to charge only during your off-peak times.

2.) The key about the monitor is ensuring that the 200A CTs are placed in a correct position on your main lines so that they can see grid power coming from one direction and backfed solar coming from the other. As long as you're seeing your Net Usage/Net Production change within the app (between blue/green numbers and values) then these should be working appropriately. These are the measurements that control the behavior of the Excess Solar Management, not related to monitoring the actual solar production from the inverter.

3.) You'll want to make sure your Emporia Level 2 Smart Home EV Charger is in a "Paused" state outside of the managed behavior. If the charger is left in a "Ready" state - then it will start charging as soon as a vehicle is plugged in, leaving it in "Paused" will allow for automated control to take over.

Ideally, whenever the Emporia Gen 2 Vue Energy Monitor detects Net Production (via the 200A CT's on the mains) - it should turn on the charger and increase the current/amperage and charge rate to consume the excess generated power. Will also decrease and turn off the charger as the amount of excess produced solar is also decreasing. If that behavior isn't happening, we can check for diagnostic details on all devices and figure out the issue from the Customer Support team.

SmartCar is one of our newest app additions having been released within the past few months. Still very early stages as you've pointed out - but planning on adding more functionality for those integrations moving forward. Things like you've suggested as well as "charge my battery to xyz% capacity" and more will be available as we improve that integration.

API? This is also something we'd also like to add in the future. Before we have an official API launched, we recommend using some of the open source projects built by customers that can act as an unofficial API.

Here's some links to a few examples of those projects:
https://github.com/helgew/emporia-downloader
https://pypi.org/project/pyemvue/
https://github.com/magico13/ha-emporia-vue
https://github.com/jertel/vuegraf

Overall we appreciate all the feedback! We're building up the team in a pretty significant fashion right now, and our goal is to bolster our development capacity to start bringing more of these features online sooner.

Keep an eye out for a bunch of improvements coming over the course of the next few months and years. We have a lot of things on the roadmap to tackle.

Always welcome to thoughts and suggestions however you'd like to communicate them with the team. Thanks!

It's such a refreshing feeling to be able to reach out directly to the manufactures of products in the market. In any case, I'm be eating some of my words in my original review. For starters, the excess solar function does 100% work, and after taking Emporia's guidance I was able to turn off scheduling and time of use to allow the excess solar to be the primary driver of the delivery of power from the EVSE.

One of the issues with my personal setup, is my solar isn't generating sufficient solar to completely offset my usage but that's not an Emporia problem. The Vue did give me a fantastic idea of where my usage is going. My master bedroom and my office both have full computer setups but I'd love to reduce my resting burn rates when the systems are not in use. Those two rooms using 8-9 kwh daily is pretty intense.

From the above you can see the total usage, the amount that went out to the grid and infer the solar generation with that sensor still being incorrectly installed. Above is with Excess solar managing my solar but with the plug not connected to the truck the entire day.

Keep up the great work @EmporiaEnergy! With announcements from GM about V2X and the need for those functions to strengthen the resilience of the grid in peak demand scenarios, your group can be one of the first to market with a third party solution. Look forward to seeing where y'all take it!

 

[solarity]

I own an Emporia Vue 2 as well and I am looking at getting their EVSE as well. I am looking into a transfer switch and I am wondering what made you go with the reliance over the generac? The reliance seems to have a watts gauge on it, while the generac has an option to upgrade to the automatic switch. Also can't find if you can do more than 30A from the utility for the reliance, though you can do 50A from untility on generac, while the generator input 30/50A is dependent on which kit you buy.

 

[RickKeen]

In regards to the flimsy holster, I just discarded it. I loop the cable over the top of the unit and let it hang to the side. Actually intrudes less into the space that way as well.

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