Eyedro Home Energy Monitor | Solar Energy/Net Metering | Save on Electricity | Bills & Reports | Real-Time Energy Data & History | EYEDRO-HOME Ethernet or WiFi Connect | (Replaces EYEFI-2)

I’ve had this unit installed, a little less than 48 hours so far and I can already tell that this is an amazingly well designed product that I will enjoy using for years to come!!!Device Installation:I only have 50A service to my house (it’s an old house). I bought 60A CTs. 200A CTs it comes with are pretty huge. The 60A CTs are itty bitty and EASILY fit into my house’s ancient cutoff switch! Installation was a breeze. CT wires are super super long too so it aids in the ease of installation!Device Setup:Super easy. Connect and web into the eyedro device, add your wifi details, and done!Web account:Make an account and then enter serial number printed on the device on the website, and done!You can even reverse the CT direction on the site in case you installed one backwards (like I did!) BRILLIANT! Why that reversal feature isn’t in all of these devices boggles my mind…API:RESTful API. Simple, easy, effective. Wanna know the best part? YOU CAN QUERY THE DEVICE ITSELF! If for some reason Eyedro goes out of business, you aren’t left with a useless piece of electronic that tries to phone home and stops working when it can’t see the Eyedro servers. You can either use a third party application or write your own (like I did) to query the device and display the relevant info where you need it! (like on my MagicMirror screen)Web interface:This interface is gorgeous. I come from efergy which is absolute trash. Eyedro gives you all the data you need, and even splits up your CTs on a beautiful, fast updating graph. It is difficult for me to overstate how much I love the interface on this website. It’s relatively clean, TONS of information, and they’re all in relatively intuitive areas. Let’s face it.. if you’re interested in installing whole house power monitoring, you’re probably a nerd. This web interface gives you the numbers and stats you want to mega nerd out.Conclusion:Want an easy to use API for your own devices (my main use case)? BUY ITWant to customize the CTs you stick inside your electrical boxes for more accuracy and space limitations? BUY ITWant a clean and beautiful web interface with TONS of numbers? BUY ITWant to use this device well after the company Eyedro has died? BUY ITdOn’t cARe AbOuT pOwEr mONItoRiNG? Why are you reading this review???

I’m not sure I’ve ever reviewed a product before, but I feel compelled. If you’re looking for something short, look elsewhere.We’re getting a home backup generator. Our electrician seems to be upselling us from a 10kWt unit to a 20kWt unit. I think we can get by with the smaller one, but I wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t make a $5K mistake to avoid a $2K one, so I bought one of these things. I’m no electrician and I wouldn’t call myself particularly handy, but I am cheap and reckless, so even seeing the manual saying that I could kill myself by trying to install it myself, I said, “What the heck.” I also bought a wireless client (Satechi-Wireless-300Mbps-Multifunction-Repeater from Amazon) since I don’t have a Ethernet port near my breaker box. That was cheaper than buying the wireless version and I wanted to see how that thing worked, too. The reviews made some complaints about packaging. Everything seemed to arrive intact, but one of the two sensors rattled a little if shook. Anyway, I unscrewed the breaker panel and discovered the main shutoff (never knew that existed). I drilled a couple of holes in the panel to run the wires from the sensors through. That was a mess because I didn’t have the right size or type of bit. I won’t embarrass myself by telling you I used a countersink widen the hole to a sufficient diameter. Saturday morning, I powered down the house at the main shutoff. Then I put on some insulated gloves, told my family I loved them, and installed the sensors. That was really easy and I didn’t die! I then set up the base Eyedro unit and the wireless client. That was about three minutes. The biggest obstacle was my illiteracy with the wireless client manual where I typed “password” rather than “admin” a couple of times before figuring out what I was doing wrong. I also had to set up a my.Eyedro account and register the device, which was largely trivial. Then I took the setup downstairs, plugged everything in again and bingo, I was getting readings at my.Eyedro.com right away. Super exciting.Now for the problems. Like I said, I’m not an electrician. One thing you have to do is set the line voltage for each sensor at my.Eyedro.com. The manual says 120V for most North American applications, but I know I have 220V appliances and my meter outside says 240V, so I figured I’d use 240V. After running for a day, the meter and my Eyedro didn’t match, so I tried writing their support, but I think it must have crashed or something, because I never heard back from that inquiry (more on that in a minute). Then I had to go to work and didn’t look at things for a week.On Tuesday, I tried writing Eyedro again via their web form and got a reply within a couple of hours. I asked if I should have voltage set at 120 or 240 and what the consequence was if I set it incorrectly. The answer was 120 and if I set it to 240 my readings would be twice as high (Power = Voltage * Amperage; the sensors report amperage). I think this explains the breakers with one lever and two breakers. Those are my 220V circuits with each breaker 110V in parallel; that’s why each breaker is the same amperage (some real electrician can confirm or call me out as the idiot I am). The Eyedro support person even invited me to send a picture of my setup to confirm everything. I haven’t done that yet, but I might. Right now I have other issues. I also went back and forth on a couple of other things (even a little chit-chat) and the support was incredibly responsive.When I looked at my.Eyedro.com Saturday evening, a week after initial installation, I noticed I hadn’t had any readings since Sunday. I did a bunch of testing and concluded that either the Eyedro base or the Eyedro power supply were bad since the tiny internal LED was not holding green reliably (not documented in the manual). I contacted support through my existing email thread and had to wait until Monday for a reply (I think they must close on weekends). Again, very quick response during regular business hours and the promise of a replacement device and power supply. No fuss at all. It has already shipped and should arrive by end of the week.Of course I’m disappointed the device failed, but the quality and responsiveness of support more than makes up for it. Hey, things break. It’s nice to know someone is there to help when that happens.Also, their web interface is very easy to navigate through. The only minor complaint I have is that you need to click a Done button sometimes to navigate to another page on the site.

I’m very happy with the eyedro. I bought the wired version, and had to snake an ethernet cable from the router to the basement, but I’ve heard from their support team that the wireless version works fine in houses (signal can go through walls, multiple floors, etc). I would recommend going wireless to save you the trouble of drilling holes in floors, and running 100′ of ethernet, running ethernet through conduits, and stapling the cable to basement ceiling walls. It took me about 2 minutes to install the eyedro, but 2 hours to run an ethernet cable, go wireless.What I love about the eyedro, is that I can see how much energy the house is using in real time. I can walk around the house turning things on and off, and my phone shows the difference a second later. So, this turns saving energy into a game. Before bed, when I’m checking that all the doors are locked, I also pull up the Eyedro current usage meter on my phone, and check that we’re only using the baseline, which is about 200 watts. If its higher than that, that means I’ve left something on: lights / monitors / computer in the office, lights in the basement. Also, I’ve been replacing all the lights in the house from incandescents to LEDs, this is a huge and easy was to reducing energy usage. (I buy my lights from IKEA, very well priced). Next, I’m also hunting the house, to try to find “phantom energy” users. i.e. things that draw a load, even though your not really using it, think stereo, vcr, tv, coffee maker. Overnight, my house used a minimum of 170 watts, meaning, once the furnace fan turned off, and the refrigerator took a break, and all the lights were off, things in the house that I’m not using still pulled that much energy. 170 watts of phantom energy, costs about $160/yr at my energy rate, and the eyedro dashboard gives you all of this information in real time reports. You can view the eyedro dashboard from your laptop, or from your phone. It’s not a native mobile app, but a mobile website, it works fine. There are a dozen or so reports or dashboards. It gives numbers and graphs, not at all complicated to figure out meaningful events. (i.e. this spike is probably the furnace fan kicking on, this spike is probably the microwave, this spike is the vacuum, this is the lights in this room turning on/off, this the tv).Also, we took a trip, and I logged in to see how much energy we were using, and we must have left in a hurry, because the house was using 900 watts baseline, oops. If your online gone for a few hours, thats 700 watts extra * 10 hours = 7kw * $0.10/kwh = $0.70 that you paid for nothing, so no big deal if your gone for a short duration, but if you were away for a week, with all that on, then oops. I’m considering adding smart light switches and outlets, that I can turn off remotely. I’m thinking Lutron Caseta for the lights, and Belkin wemo for the outlets. I’m not how long the ROI, from those things would take, but personally, I’d like to save energy. Also, when using energy, is something is a very short duration usage, such as a vacuum for 5 minutes, or a sander for 20 minutes, that doesn’t cost much energy in the grand scheme, but things that are always running, such as lights, fridge, furnace fan, office, that’s where you’ll want to pay attention to usage.The next thing I have planned for eyedro, is to take a look at how much energy my appliances are using. I could see how much energy the coffee maker uses, the refrigerator uses. Eyedro doesn’t have the ability to single out individual appliances, it just measures the whole-house, but, at 8am I started the coffee machine, and it used energy for 2 hours. The refrigerator has all of these cycles, that is pretty much continuous throughout the day. So, I could compare them to newer models that use less energy. Maybe, just pour my coffee into a carafe, or get maker that brews it into a carafe, and then turns off.Down the road, I’d like to add a solar panel electric system to the house, maybe. Before then, I’d like the house to be efficient with usage, so that I won’t have to buy as expensive of a system, and eyedro is helping me to steer that direction.Also, I was having issues with our internet, and since the eyedro is always uploading data to the cloud, whenever the internet would drop, I got emails that eyedro lost connectivity. Thus, I had data to tell my ISP that the internet had been flaky, and they replaced the modem.Conclusion: Its a nice toy to show off to others, but it gives you data, that helps you to take action to reduce your usage, to ultimately reduce your electricity bill. Its not just turn off the lights because I said so, but this light is using this much energy, and this is how much its costing us per hour. Lastly, if I were to buy this again, I would spring for the wireless version, save yourself the hassle of running a cable to your basement.

Overall this is an excellent tool for power monitoring and has excellent cloud based software support.We have two 200A panels, one for our house and one for an associated Mother’s apartment. I purchased two sets of monitors and installed one set on each panel (Main House-Port A, Main House-Port B, Apt-Port A, and Apt-Port B). Primary purpose is to understand our power usage, peak loads and gather pre-planning data for installation of a whole house standby generator. Installation was exceptionally easy (BUT PLEASE NOTE CAUTION BELOW). Both hardwired CAT5 LAN/internet connections functioned perfectly without issue. CAUTION, CAUTION,CAUTION: Be very careful when installing the current sensors within the panels–if in doubt have a professional electrician do it. Even if the Main Disconnect is in the OFF position, there is still incoming 240VAC at the top of the panel–inadvertently touching either phase of the incoming feed could be very, very dangerous.The MyEyedro cloud software works very well. We use it on PC’s, Android tablet, and Android cellphone–I would say that it is slightly more convenient to use on a PC. You can monitor your home power usage from anywhere there is internet connectivity.In “Live” mode, you can “aggregate” all sensors and display total KW power consumption versus time (total of all, in this case, 4, sensors). Live graph time scale is adjustable from 24 hours down to 15 minutes and a separate graph shows a summary for each day in the last week. The graphs are “clickable” and “zoomable”. You can opt to turn “aggregate” off and then the individuals sensors are separately displayed–in this case four individual traces, each in a different color (a “legend” display identifies which trace is which sensor). This is very useful for observing peak load and power consumption of individual high consumption items such as A/C systems, electric ovens, etc.Using MyEyedro we were able to verify that peak starting surge current for our various HVAC systems were reduced by a factor of 2-3 when so-called “hard start” capacitors were installed.A “Summary” mode shows power usage (in kWh) by the month, week, day, hour or 15 minute interval. Billing information and cost per kWh can be entered to display power costs and estimate power costs versus time. A Phantom Energy (phantom energy=standby modes for TV’s and Audio gear, Clock displays, cordless rechargers, night lights, etc.–stuff that you might think is off, but is still consuming power) function monitors minimum power consumption during the last 24 hours and, shockingly, how much it costs over the course of a year. There are many more useful features of the software that are beyond describing here.Overall I am totally satisfied with the MyEyedro system and have found it to be an excellent tool for monitoring and understanding electrical usage within the home (or business). I would highly recommend it.

I needed to know how much current my main sub-panel was using because I am thinking of getting a home battery that would support only the 120V circuits in my house. I installed the 4 sensors at the service entrance: one on each phase going to the main sub-panel in the laundry room, and one on each of the ovens. The photo shows what it looks like on the outside of the house; it is not pretty mostly because I just splatted lots of painters tape to hold the unit on the wall. The AC adapter is plugged in at the upper left and the EYEFI unit is buried under the blue tape. The unit does have two tabs for screws if I had wanted to mount it permanently.I dinged the “easy to install” one star because the Quick Start Guide does not specify which orientation to use when installing the sensors. The ‘proper’ orientation is hidden in the Product Guide: “The sensor cable exit should face the load”. It turns out that this is mostly meaningless in split phase installations because phases A & B are reversed already, and the primary phase depends upon the phase and orientation of the AC adapter. Just be content to know that device setup on the website allows inverting the signal so you don’t really need to worry about the sensor orientation at all.The screen shot shows the “Live Demand” from this morning. It is real easy to see the bottom oven preheating and then cycling between two power levels as it keeps the oven at a near-constant temperature. The orange and blue lines are the two phases of the house sub-panel in the laundry room. The phase B (line 2) shows items like the toaster and the electric kettle being used. I’ve been so impressed with the results so far in 4 days that I have already purchased another EYEFI-4 to be used inside the laundry panel to figure out which circuits (&appliances) are contributing to the spikes in the sub-panel load.The sales team is very knowledgeable about the EYEFI product line and answered both calls and emails with useful answers. I get the impression this is a small company where everybody talks to each other. I had no need to call technical support with questions since sales could answer mine.