[Hardware 0003] Emporia is almost a fantastic smart plug with energy monitoring.
9 cents per hour is roughly $65 a month
Introduction
9 cents per hour is roughly $65 a month. That's what I learned when I purchased a four pack of the Emporia Energy App to monitor how much power I was using as well as how much power it takes to run stable diffusion. When you use those numbers, purchasing shared use of a GPU from something like Google collab starts to make sense. Nonetheless, there are many good reasons why you don't want to trust big brother with your projects. When I talk about Emporia smart plugs I am talking about it in the context of it’s power monitoring primarily and not just a smart plug. If it were just a smart plug then brand names like TP-Link’s Kasa do quite well and I have a couple of those as well. However, Emporia has much more sophisticated software and it’s perfect except for one big flaw.
“Duct tape” fix
I really like the device because it has so much packed into it and can be accessed on your phone. However, it has a fatal flaw that I like to call "Google Home duct tape" that you have to mitigate or correct before you can really trust this to do anything other than bit of a gimmick to turn off a light or two.
What is Google Home duct tape? Well, I call it that because that's where I discovered this "one neat little trick", but I'm sure it's used all over in many different smart home devices. Essentially, if you stare long and hard enough at your Google Home in the whee hours of the night when you should be asleep you'll see your Google Home reboot itself. I call it the duct tape solution because my best guess is this is done to ensure that if there are any memory leaks or sluggish performance that it'll be fixed with a restart.
It can cause nightmares.
Here is my computer losing power because the Emporia decided it was time to apply the duct tape fix. Thankfully, I wasn't doing anything important, but things could've gotten bad. Despite the shortcoming, this level of granularity for a sub $10 (per unit) device is amazing.
Emporia also applies this duct tape solution. The problem is whereas the Google Home is just a quasi-assistant with a screen, the Emporia smart plug can actually be powering critical infrastructure that you don't want to go down randomly. That is exactly what happened to my PC while I was troubleshooting something else and I was rather surprised because usually when there's a hiccup in the power either it goes down for a few minutes or the power flickers. Never has the power shut off and then turned back on. This was quite troubling so I went to the product listing to search for answers and this is what I came across.
The "cOmPeTiTiOn" for energy monitoring
Unfortunately, Emporia is the only device that plugs into an outlet that I've found at this price point and usability that can provide you this granular level of information. Kasa advertises that they can monitor your power, but their version of energy monitoring is like riding a bicycle versus driving a car with Emporia. That's why I got Emporia smart plug in the first place. It's obvious to me that Kasa just did the minimum to check off a box. If you simply need a smart plug then Kasa is hands down the best. I have a couple myself. However, I wanted something that could monitor power usage and Kasa is far far behind Emporia.
The solution
Don’t get one. That’s the easy solution. However, if you want a cheap affordable smart switch that has the capability to monitor energy usage then there’s no easy solution. There was talk of a firmware update that would improve reliability, but it seems the update did nothing to solve this issue. If you really want to track your usage you either look elsewhere or you have to fork out more money to put an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), which is a big battery between your hardware and the Emporia. This works for me because I have an old UPS lying around that I have procrastinated changing the batteries for for a long while, so it's free to be used. For other people I would say you're looking at a minimum of $60, but if you're powering a PC Desktop then you're looking to fork out at least $100. On the plus side, you're essentially forced to purchase an important upgrade for the longevity of your hardware as random power outage could quick literally fry your computer.
If you 1) understand that you can't use this 24/7 for anything beyond a light switch or perhaps a microwave, 2) you want to use it as a testing tool to see the draw, or 3) you are willing or already have a UPS feel free to check out the listing via my affiliate link. If the Emporia smart plug breaks, I'll post an update. For now, I will recommend it... with caveats.