Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Early this year, after moving into a new house, I had to replace the entire HVAC system with a new high efficiency, multi zone system with a whole house humidifier. I love the new system, but was frustrated it provides no usage history in spite of built in expensive digital cloud enabled thermostats. I looked around for something that would monitor its electric usage and only found the Sense. After reading about how the Sense worked, I decided its machine learning identification approach was too complex, took too long, and was too error prone for my needs, and decided not to purchase it. Fast forward six months later to December. I got an electric bill that had jumped up $40 from the month before. This did not make sense to me so I decided to look for an electric monitoring system again. This time found the Gen 2 Emporia Vue. It was exactly what I was looking for. I didn't need complicated device specific energy usage identification, I just wanted to monitor my electric usage at the circuit level. Since most big electricity consumers in the house, such as the HVAC system, the humidifier, the range, fridge, washer, dryer, etc, are on dedicated circuits, why would I need device level identification? I did end up buying four of their smart outlets to track our radon fan and deep freeze that are not on dedicated circuits. The outlets work perfectly. It took less than an hour to install all 16 sensors and it worked perfectly from the beginning except for one sensor. I contacted their online chat support and 15 minutes later they are sending me a replacement free of charge! At first. my wife didn't understand why we would need such a thing. She is on board now once I explained an unexpected benefit. Our 15 year old son often cooks pizzas in the oven at night and then forgets to turn the oven off. It is on all night long. The Vue will send him a notification if the oven is on for longer than 2 hours. The duration is settable. Oh yeah, the extra $40 turned out to be from 400 watts of ceramic reptile heaters I had just started using in my infrared grill to keep the propane tank warm during our cold Montana winters. After some experimentation I wouldn't have done if not for the Vue, I found I didn't need them and am saving $40 a month. I also discovered that all the hanging lights in the house that use halogen bulbs used a lot of electricity, as well. They have been replaced with LED. So, in the end, the product, service, and the savings in electricity have exceeded my expectations!