 Hi, I'm Nate Adams, often known as Nate The House Whisperer, and I've gotten a lot of questions about what the difference is between Sense Energy Monitor and the Emporia View Energy Monitor. So I wanted to make a video of this so that you can see them both. So I'm going to do it with their web apps. The phone apps are both pretty good. I do have to say the Sense app has some really cool features in it that I do like better. But I'll be really upfront, I drastically prefer the Emporia View. It's not just because it's cheaper. That helps. It's a ballpark of $150 where the Sense is $300. But the Sense does have a really cool app. I love how you can zoom in and out and things. There are some pieces to the application that are really nice. We're going to look at web apps here in this video. So I will flip over to the Sense and actually here, let's start real quick. So I have an Emporia View on three different houses and it's very easy to see all three of them and switch between them. I don't know that Sense has this feature. And like Mountain Escape, this is the house where I'm at right now, our house in West Virginia. I haven't put a second monitor on this, but my barn here has a hundred amp panel. So I can actually put two in the same house if I want to, which is kind of slick. But you can see all three of them are running simultaneously. So you got the river house, which is the one we're going to be looking at because I have a Sense and an Emporia in that house. It's outside Cleveland, Ohio, where I'm in West Virginia right now. And then this house is pulling a little under a thousand watts. And Game House, which is the first Airbnb that we finished here is around 800. But I'll do a separate video looking at those three as well within this comparing and contrasting. But for this video, we're going to compare Sense and Emporia View. So let me expand River House here because this is what we're going to look at. So right now it's saying about 1180 watts. Let's flip over to Sense. And we have about 1200. So they do have a couple percent disagreement. I don't have a reference instrument, so I'm not 100% sure which one's right. But I do think Sense probably has better voltage monitoring for this. So Emporia maybe off a little bit more. Now really important piece here. What I really don't like about the Sense is that it misses variable loads. And I've been waiting on them to try and figure that out for years. But in electrifications, we almost always use variable speed heat pumps. And it just totally misses them. And it can miss other things too. I had to sell my Chevy Volt because we needed a tow vehicle for our camper. But it missed my Volt about half the time. And it's a really easy load pattern to see because it came on and it was 3.3kW, 3300 watts. And then it tapered off at the end. So it should have been a pretty obvious signal. But it didn't pick it up for months. And then when it did pick it up, it missed the charge cycles about half the time. So that was very, very frustrating. And then the variable speed heat pumps that we use, it doesn't pull those out separately. And so it's difficult to understand what those units are pulling. And I learn a lot about the operation of the heat pumps from watching how they pull power. So it's very frustrating when I can't see them individually. And so to do that, Sense just has two clamps. You clamp the two mains in the panel and that's it. Where with the Emporia, you clamp the two mains and then you can get either 8 or 16 CT current transmitter clamps that you can watch individual circuits. And I don't know that Sense's path is viable. It has some usefulness, the reports are really awesome, and the app is really awesome for seeing what's going on at very specific moments. And I love that you can zoom out. So like you could zoom out, look back a month, and then zoom in on a second that happened a month ago where Emporia doesn't let you do that very easily. So like Emporia actually deletes your very granular data, your second and minute data within a couple of days of it happening. So anyway, that's some up front what I'm thinking about these. So here's Sense, this is their bubbles, and I have to say it's pretty slick. I mean, their app's amazing. It's really cool looking. It's well thought out. Picking up weird things like I don't know why it's picking up an oil radiator at 3 watts. Always on. This is like the internet and things. The fridge turns on and off and it's ballpark 200 watts. You get a little ramp up a little bit over time. I have no idea what unnamed heat is. It's found so many devices I stopped trying to name them. I just got tired of them, and it also will refine things. So like I use window units at this house right now up in Ohio, and there's three of them. But it says I have nine or 10 different window units, and you can combine them, but I just got tired of screwing around with it. And then also there's pretty bad connectivity problems with Sense. So like in the last month, it's just not worked for like two weeks. Now to be fair, I have this in a panel that's in the wall, and there's no way for me to get the antenna outside of the box. But the internet router is only about 10 feet away, and the Emporia has not dropped signal ever that I'm aware of, and the Sense has been down about 50% of the time here. So it's just frustrating. So I've kind of given up on it, unfortunately, even though it has some cool features. So anyway, Sense, you can see a timeline of when things turn on and off. So here's like Air Conditioner turning on and off, it sees some various things. This timeline used to be more useful, and if you have a fairly quiet house, quote unquote, where you don't have a ton of stuff plugged in, it can be more likely to find things. I've got one client that just, she lives alone, and she doesn't have a ton of stuff plugged in, and Sense works pretty well for her, although it still misses the heat pump. So we'll see if Dashboard will work, it wasn't working when I checked earlier. This, I love the comparison though, where you can see how you compare to other homes out there. And good, it's coming up. And so Emporia doesn't have this, let's see, view detailed usage, where we get to this. So see, look at this, these gaps in connectivity here. So I mean, there's a week gone there, I guess that week hasn't happened. Last couple of months were good, but like around the turn of the year, there were a bunch of periods where it just wasn't connecting. So it might just be not pulling quickly enough from the, well, I guess here you go. So look, it was missing a huge chunk of March, but almost all of March. So that happens often enough that it just leaves me feeling frustrated. But it is nice, I mean, you can see various things through here. Since the meter, I'll run over to this, you can zoom out, so I'm going to zoom out on this. So this is 15 minutes, but like you could switch to a week view and zoom way out and then zoom right in to a couple of seconds. And that's pretty cool, I think it was not working for that week. So like let's zoom in on this peak. We use this house as an Airbnb now, we rent it out most of the time, except when we go up there. But you can zoom in, this is way easier to do on your phone. But in any case, it's nice that you can zoom in and out like that. Emporia does not allow that. So apparently it was a difficult feature to build for sense. So I'm glad that they did. So let's click devices, you can see what's going on. So look at this AC 11, 13, 14, 15, I don't have 15 air conditioners, I have three. It's annoying that you have to do this and then you have to go in and combine. And I did this for a while initially when it was fun and interesting. Chevy Volts, I haven't owned that car for a good while. Let's go back to when I did. So I sold that I think July of 2020. We bought a van, bought a camper, we went around the whole country. So yeah, here you go. So it would catch a lot. So like 11.4 kilowatt hours, that's what it took to give that car full charge, right in that ballpark. And like this is a day where I double charged the car. But there were definitely a number of times, and I don't know that it was in this exact time frame, but like here, the odds are that I charged the car within this period. So it's weird that it's missing. So I noticed that it missed nearly half of the times when it was charging, and it took a while to find it. So that was frustrating. So you can see it's got a whole bunch of things in here, like a bunch of dehumidifiers, three different coffee makers, two different dishwashers. Now to be fair, I moved this from one house to another. So there's some things that's not perfect on. So I need to be sure to make that clear. I moved this monitor from a different house. The heat pump, it was good at finding this because it's a single stage. It's a roll-around heat pump, and we used it for air conditioning. But you can see where it was used and where it wasn't. I'm going to go back to the winter time. We'll see if it will pull up. It's going to take it a little bit of time, it looks like. But so there's some things that are nice. And if it's a constant load device, here you go, you can see how much energy it was pulling. Some of these feel a bit low considering that month. So it may have been missing some of this because we were running this heat pump quite hard through this period. It was our main source of heat. That house has resistance baseboard. And so I was trying to offset some of that cost by using that heat pump. OK, so there's the various pieces here. And labs on the phone is really cool. There's all kinds of different things that you can see. You can see if your voltage varies a whole lot. It's got some cool stuff. So that's where SENSE has some very interesting things that Emporia does not yet have. I believe that Emporia has voltage monitoring because now they don't just have one plug into it for power. You have to grab power from both legs for it. So they should be able to do voltage monitoring. But you will see some variants. So we're about 1,500 watts and you saw something just turned off from like 1,800. Let's go to now, 1,500, we're in that ballpark. So they're close, but they're not quite dead on. And they're usually off by just a little bit. Something turned on. Yep. Yeah, I don't know if it just missed it or whatever. So that could be resistance heat routinely turns on and then turns off almost immediately. Yeah, there you go and catch what it said it was. So there's something running that this is my office. This is going to be the window unit. So here is how Emporia works. So you can see the total usage of the house and then you can clamp whatever you want going through all of this and then you rename them. So like the heat velocity, this is my daughter's room. This has resistance baseboard and every room is different. And I only recently added these because I didn't realize it, but I got an 8 CT model, not a 16. So I took some up from the other ones that I bought and hook those up a couple months ago. But you can see all of the individual things here and what's pulling and what's not. You can put smart plugs on, which I really like doing. So you can see what these are doing and then whatever the balance is, it shows you down here. So there's 900 Watts of something running that is not clamped. And that's probably the two air conditioners. It's a fairly warm day today. I don't think it's as brutal as the last couple days, which have been over 90. But it's still a pretty warm day. So they're up there running away. Now what you can do though is you can go look at individual things. Like I only just recently got the heat clamped and I wanted to understand which circuits were doing most of the heating. It's like early in the season I asked a guest to turn the heat on and they only turned a handful of the like six different thermostats on. So it turned out that the living room resistance was basically heating the house. The bedrooms just weren't turned on. So at least the house didn't freeze. That's good. But that can be the curse of asking a guest to do something. But I can click on one like here's the heat southeast foyer and naturally it shouldn't have been on here for a while. But the bottom I can click a month to scoot over. So with this you have to scoot it over. So this one didn't do hardly anything. So what actually I can do is you can look at month or even year and see what's going on. Here's my office has pulled 50 kilowatt hours which is probably largely the air conditioner. And here you go it switched. So the bath heater I've had that plugged into a smart plug. It's an oil resistance heater and that's used 813 kilowatt hours. So that's definitely done a bunch of the heating. The dehumidifier this smart plug just broke for whatever reason I haven't been up there since. But I can watch the dehumidifier run which serves as fresh air and filtration for this house as well as well as dehumidification. You can see the refrigerator used quite a bit. I mean it's kind of wild the refrigerator has used twice the power as the heat pump water heater. This is an old refrigerator. But like all of this is easy to see. In sense it's not all bad. Let's see here devices and let's see month. This is easier to see in the the phone app basement fridge. We'll show this. It was the fridge that we brought from the basement of the old house. It's not very efficient. Here we are. It's seen this but oh I guess there's our our gap. But you can see what it's using every day which this is quite a bit of power. It's a small fridge and at the end of the day look at this it's 90 bucks a year based on last 30 days. Who cares. It's working for now and it's a weird small hole that it needs to go in and it fits. So there's some things you just don't worry about. At some point we'll replace it but not yet with 700 kilowatt hours a year is a pretty good chunk. So anyway it's just interesting to see what all of these things are but like it's it's missed quite a bit of the year as well. Average usage is 192 watts things like that. So what it shows for the devices can be pretty useful if it picks up the device and it misses quite a bit. Let's click refrigerator. Here's the annual use. I put this in March of last year something like that. So 780 kilowatt hours for 10 months of the year and look at month and see if there's any variances. Yeah it's kind of interesting there's that much variance from month to month. Now it's possible that there's a connectivity issue here or something like that but it hasn't, Emporia hasn't been off much. But just kind of walking through there's a lot of different stuff to look at here but I really like how Emporia breaks out all of the individual things and you can begin to see like what's pulling a bunch of heat and what's not like the master turned out to be doing quite a bit of the heating. Heat in the office this is my office up there. The washer and dryer has been used a reasonable amount they're quite efficient so that's actually a fair chunk of usage for those. You can see how much the induction stove has used. This is another variable one too which since doesn't do a very good job of picking up because it's got five burners and the burners are variable. It will pick up the oven because the oven pulls the same amount of power all the time but it can miss stuff and then like the water pump you can see it's used some but what is this? This is so far this month. So we are midway through the month and it's used three and a half kilowatt hours. The pump pulls a lot when it runs it's like 1800 watts something like that but it doesn't need to run that much. That's always the tricky part. You can have a big load like a dryer pulls 4500 watts but it doesn't necessarily run that much. A load is an hour or so of run time so it depends how many loads you're doing to see if it really really matters. If you have a big family it matters. If you have a small family probably not that much. In any case you can kind of get a view here. I've got a pretty good idea of where energy is being used at the river house here with Emporia where with the sense I'm kind of clueless which is kind of annoying and it bums me out. So at this point with the sense being twice as much money as the Emporia there's going to be applications where it's nice if you're super nerd great buy it too but if you're only going to get one I would definitely do the Emporia and that makes me kind of sad to say but there you go. Been watching these for years and if you look at the sense Facebook group which was not created by sense you'll see this refrain too like it just doesn't pick stuff up. So bums me out to say this but unless sense can get some pretty big jumps and I mean they do have the option so they have a solar option where you can have two extra clamps that you put on solar and you can instead use those to clamp other things like the heat pumps but that's still only two that you can watch and it's still double the price for this where you can watch 16 so there you go and I have to say look at Emporia's other products too their smart outlets are they're smart plugs they're pretty cheap last I bought them were 850 or 9 bucks a piece in a pack of four and they track usage and you can turn them on and off you can schedule them there's all sorts of things I'm using them in our Airbnb's for running lights and that's been really fun and cool to do so take a good look at all the stuff that Emporia has out they've got a car charger out they've got a two-way car charger coming next year they've got a battery that's about to drop they're coming out with a complete line of basically electrification options so keep an eye on that company I'm excited to see where they go so hopefully this is helpful sense is pretty cool nice app but it's just it's it's falling down on too many things at the same time where Emporia for half the money gives you a lot more visibility into what's going on and I think is coming out with a bunch of innovative products that will all talk to each other so my pretty strong leaning is for Emporia between Emporia in the sense now so I'm Nate Adams have yourself a great day hope this is helpful talk to you later bye bye