Price: $690 and up, including 2-year service.
Powerhouse Dynamics makes eMonitor, which, like the BrulTech system, can monitor many circuits in your house. Whereas other monitors are primarily aimed at measuring the total consumption of electricity in your house, eMonitor is distinct in several ways. Like most other monitors, eMonitor has current sensors, but it has sensors to monitor each circuit in your house and records the data separately. eMonitor connects to your home network and sends the data to its secure servers on the Internet. What you get with this level of detail is stunning -- eMonitor has a hardware component that is quite sophisticated, but as you learn about eMonitor you'll see that it truly shines when it comes to helping you understand and act upon the data that it is recording.
eMonitor is designed from the ground up to be a product for consumers. Connections at the panel box are straightforward, using one of several sizes of split-CTs that wrap around the circuit wires. No electrical connection is required. Wires lead out of the box to one or more eMonitor control units. Pricing includes the data collection hardware and monitoring service. eMonitor is packaged with enough of the parts you need to handle most or all of the circuits in a house, and can be easily extended either in larger service panels, or sub-panels. Unlike the BrulTech, the data management and monitoring service is bundled with the hardware. eMonitor's hardware configuration is simpler -- just plug in the CTs, then use the software to tell the system what has gone where.
Your account's website provides numerous views that enable you to easily see and understand what your consumption is or was at any moment. You can aggregate, dissect, slice and dice the data and see very well thought out graphs, charts and tools to help visualize what's going on.
eMonitor also provides customizable alerts. At first, this sounded like a "nice to have" feature, but part of having a useful product collecting data over the long run is the continuity of data -- eMonitor alerts you if something's wrong (e.g. bad network connection), and holds on to the data locally for a while so it can catch up when the problem is restored.
Overall, eMonitor along with the data monitoring service seems to be about the same price as the BrulTech product or a bit less, although they are two different products, to be sure, so a little difficult to compare.
And honestly, we have had a lot more experience with eMonitor -- both are complex and sophisticated products, doing rather impressive things. From the outside, the eMonitor seems to be a more polished, consumer-oriented product than the BrulTech. It's pretty clear that there are a lot of different configurations out there and eMonitor seems to handle all of them well through software configuration rather than hardware.
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