I don’t know how each of you discovered IoTaWatt. I don’t actively advertise like all of the other energy monitors. Yet I believe IotaWatt has a lot of virtues that the well marketed energy monitors lack. The others also have their unique virtues.
There is a modest amount of traffic to the stuff.iotawatt.com store, and it’s increasing. The new store has the ability to post reviews. (near the bottom of each product page). If you can take a few minutes to share your experience, and maybe what you see as the strengths and weaknesses, I think it would help others that are looking for feedback to aid in their choice.
Any product or bundle can be reviewed, but I think it would be most helpful to have the reviews on the various bundles - North-America, Euro, Aussie.
Do I need to be logged in and authorised to leave a review, or previously purchased that unit from the store?
I have 2 units and 28 CTs and would be thrilled to leave a review but i don’t get an option yet. That said the units were purchased before the store was open so…?
Hi Bob. We bought our IWs through emoncms. I’d love to give you a great review but didnt purchase from your store. A couple of things I really like is the local logging an catch up to my emoncms after a comms outage. The OS in the IW is veey impressive with its service oriented architecture. By we I mean me and pete/Bluetardis.
Very timely. There was a head on car crash yesterday a few town over from me, and one of the cars burned completely right under the utility lines. (Driver got out, no serious injuries). Long story short, my internet went down for about 16 hours. It came back late this morning and my Emoncms and PVoutput caught right up. My influxDB is a local RPi so it kept chugging oblivious to the whole episode.
One of my past lives was writing a multiprocessor virtual machine operating system for a large minicomputer company (Wang Laboratories). The scheduler and primitives in the IW are trivial by comparison, and could use a makeover, but when I started this runaway train I was just learning C++ and wasn’t planning that far ahead. Maybe in the ESP32…
I have probably at least half of the people looking at the Sense Energy Monitor on amazon coming to your site. My review of that became the 3rd “most helpful” on amazon so it is the one that everyone sees without having to click in to view more. Haha. So glad I switched over and glad amazon never took it down.
I had not seen that review. Traffic has been increasing, and IoTaWatt is catching on. Sense is a marketing juggernaut. Conversely, I don’t advertise at all. I believe their market is US and Canada only, and just 120V/240V split phase. No three-phase, no 230V, no 50Hz. IoTaWatt literally can work anywhere with the proper VTs and CTs. So there is a lot of space for both of us.
Glad to help out. I had given Sense a number of ideas about how to improve as I work in IT myself and they shrugged me off with each so I was mad enough to write a review.
Thanks for writing this, your Amazon review is the reason I’m here too.
I found IoTaWatt on Google but I didn’t find the website trustworthy enough. At first I didn’t even understand where the CT’s get mounted. I couldn’t find case study photos of example installations anywhere, and most of the products in the store here have zero reviews so I wrote it off.
I was seriously considering the Sense (begrudignly, I really wanted per-circuit monitoring) when I found your review, and I gave IoTaWatt another look. There’s exactly one YouTube video showing an IoTaWatt installation, so after seeing that I finally had the context to understand what the product is.
I’ve just ordered mine. We’ll be redoing the electrical in my house + mounting IoTaWatt in September so once it’s installed I look forward to writing a review & maybe uploading another YouTube case study of my own
To be fair, there is also the http://www.theenergydetective.com/ but that whole setup was a a good bit beyond my price range. At least double the cost.
“My Wang does wonders!”… “My Wang never goes down!”
My father used to work for Wang Laboratories in Lowell back in the 80’s. I still remember using a Wangwriter word processor. Those were some very exciting times in the computer industry in the Northeast. I even worked a few summers at Digital Equipment Corporation in Nashua back in those days. Fun times for sure.
Haha. Glad to hear it. You won’t regret it. Even with the current sale price of Sense. It’s just too painful sitting there day after day without any big appliances being detected knowing I spent that much. Sense has even contacted me a few times via email in the last few months because my review is the second most popular on their product asking if we can talk some more about the issues that I had and see if we can come to some sort of agreement (I’m assuming they want me to delete or change my review?) I just keep deleting the emails from them as it isn’t worth my time.
Same - I discovered IotaWatt because of that Amazon review!! Ordered one after reading up all the docs and was convinced this is exactly what I want - I should be getting it soon. Will document my experiences installing and using it,
