If you want to look at the electricity consumption in real time at home, the easiest way is to look at it in a timely manner through the smart electricity meter. By accessing through the official website of i-DE or UFD, depending on the distributor in your area, you will be able to check the power demanded at a certain moment, and you will also be able to see the consumption of previous days, but not the consumption of the current day. Today at RedesZone we are going to show you how you can see the power demanded and consumption in real time in your home, and all this from a smartphone, tablet or computer.
What is Shelly EM for?
The Shelly EM is a device that is responsible for measuring the amperage that passes through the main phase of your house, this device is equipped with a current clamp that is capable of detecting how many A are being demanded (since the voltage or V is stable at 230V approximately). This device connects directly to the Wi-Fi network in our home, without the need to buy any type of hub to connect it to the Internet. With the Shelly EM, we will be able to see the power demanded in real time, and we will also see the daily consumption that we have accumulated. Of course, we will be able to see complete graphs of electricity consumption in our house.
This device allows to measure a total of two different electrical circuits. For example, we could measure the total consumption of the house by connecting the current clamp to the general phase of the house (the thick brown cable that you can see in the following photograph), and also measure the consumption of one of the circuit breakers, such as the one in electrical appliances, lights or plugs, all through the electrical panel of the house.
In the event that you want to put this device on one of the frame rails, if you have space, you will be able to buy a kit with everything you need for it:
In the following photograph you can see a common electrical panel in homes. In order to power the Shelly EM, we need to connect it with phase and neutral in the lower part of any differential or circuit breaker, you could also place it directly in the general of the house in case you are used to lowering some differentials when you are not at home.
This device supports the HTTP protocol to access the administration and display of all the data via the web, but it also supports other protocols oriented towards home automation such as MQTT. This Shelly EM integrates seamlessly with Home Assistant. Regarding the technical characteristics, this device is compatible with international voltage standards (110-230 V ± 10% 50/60 Hz in AC), it is capable of measuring a maximum current of up to 120A, but for this we will have to buy the 120A clamp meter. Generally in homes we have 50A maximum.
If you have solar panels, you could measure both the consumption of your home as well as the production of photovoltaic energy, with the aim of measuring everything in real time without the need to use the inverter apps, which normally have a certain delay.
As you can see, it is a very simple device but it will provide us with very valuable information.
Uses that we can give
This device will show us the power demanded in real time of our home, and also the accumulated daily consumption. Thanks to Shelly EM, we will be able to do all this:
- control the power demanded at home so as not to overdo it and avoid the jump of the ICP of our home.
- If we combine it with home automation, we could make automations to temporarily turn off other devices that consume energy and that do not have priority. For example, let’s imagine that we are cooking with the induction hob and we also have the oven on, we could make the oven turn off temporarily for a few minutes, and then turn it back on by itself.
- Create a complete record of power demands and the accumulated daily, weekly and monthly consumption, etc.
- Integrate it with Home Assistant and create many automations.
As you can see, if we integrate it with Home Assistant we will be able to see complete consumption graphs, in addition, we will also be able to see all the information from its official Shelly app for Android and iOS smartphones.
