Best energy monitoring for solar homes

If you’ve installed solar panels, you already know the question that keeps you up at night: is my system performing as expected, and am I actually saving money? The answer lives in your data, and the inverter’s glowing screen shows you very little of it. Most inverter manufacturers provide cloud dashboards, and they’re fine for basic checking, but they tie you to their platform, sometimes gate historical data behind a subscription, and go offline when your internet drops. Here’s how to build a local-first energy monitoring setup in Home Assistant, which pulls data from almost everything, stores it locally, and turns the readings into usable charts on its Energy dashboard. The tradeoff is more configuration upfront.

If your meter has a P1 port, start with the HomeWizard P1 Meter. For US panels, an Emporia Vue 3 flashed with ESPHome gives you many circuits fully local, and the Shelly Pro 3EM is the cleaner CT-clamp meter for mains and solar. Add a Shelly Plus 2PM or an Eve Energy plug for per-circuit and per-appliance detail.

Hardware options that work locally

The right starting point depends on your setup.

Smart meter with a P1 port (mainly the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg). The HomeWizard P1 Meter is the simplest path. P1 is not a Europe-wide standard: it is native in NL, BE, LU and Switzerland, and reachable in Denmark, Sweden and Norway with HomeWizard’s HAN converter, so check your own meter before you buy. It plugs into your meter’s P1 port and feeds grid import/export (and, where the meter reports it, production) into Home Assistant via a local API. The P1 Meter is one of the HomeWizard devices that skips the app’s “Local API” toggle and authenticates with a button press on the meter during setup instead, and there’s a “cloud connection” toggle you can switch off entirely. The HomeWizard integration reads it locally and creates power/energy sensors. I haven’t run one myself (no P1 meter here); other Home Assistant users report multi-year deployments without trouble. If you would rather keep the reading on your Zigbee mesh, the frient Electricity Meter Interface is an option, but it is not a P1 reader: the variant I link is the LED model, which sits over the blinking pulse LED on the meter face and needs a one-time pulse-rate calibration. frient sells a separate P1 version if your meter has the port.

Whole-panel / circuit-level monitoring with CT clamps (US and elsewhere). This is the one most guides get wrong: for measuring your main panel and solar production, you want a CT-clamp energy meter, not an in-wall relay.

• The Shelly Pro 3EM is a clean local-first choice: a three-phase (or split-phase) CT-clamp energy meter that reports per-phase voltage, current, and power over Wi-Fi/LAN, integrates with Home Assistant via the Shelly integration or MQTT, and keeps the cloud strictly optional. Clamp it around your mains (and a dedicated CT around the solar feed) and the Energy dashboard can compute production, consumption, and net. If the rest of your house already runs on Shelly gear, those same sensors slot straight into the wider Home Assistant energy dashboard alongside the PM relays and plugs.
• The Emporia Vue 3 is the budget circuit-level pick for US panels: two 200A mains CTs, one per leg of a split-phase service, plus 50A branch CTs in 8- or 16-circuit kits. It works with its own app out of the box, but for local-first use you can flash it with ESPHome, which turns it into a fully local Home Assistant sensor with sub-second updates and no cloud (both the Gen 2 and Gen 3 use an ESP32 and need a one-time wired serial flash inside the case with a USB-to-TTL adapter on the board’s pads, after which you push any updates over Wi-Fi/OTA). A spare CT on the solar circuit gives you generation data too.

Either way, installing CTs means opening your panel and clamping around live conductors. If you’re not comfortable with that, hire an electrician - this is serious voltage.

Individual circuits and appliances. A device like the Shelly Plus 2PM is a small in-wall relay with built-in power metering on each of its two channels (up to 10A per channel, 16A total). It’s great for measuring and switching specific loads - a couple of dedicated circuits, a water heater, etc. - but to be clear, it is not a CT-clamp whole-panel monitor. Shelly has discontinued the Plus 2PM; the Shelly 2PM Gen4 is the current version and meters the same way. Use it for per-circuit detail, and use a Pro 3EM or Emporia Vue 3 for the mains. The same split applies to every other local in-wall relay worth putting behind a switch: they meter the load they switch, not the panel.

Per-plug monitoring. For individual devices, the Eve Energy smart plug does per-device monitoring over Thread/Matter. It’s now “Works with Home Assistant” certified and runs locally over Thread (you’ll need a Thread border router on the network first), reporting power, voltage, and cumulative energy. Handy for spot-checking a specific appliance without opening the panel.

One thing to note: many cheap “energy monitoring” smart plugs only report on/off with crude estimates. If you’re serious about solar, budget for hardware that actually measures wattage - the smart plugs with local control and energy monitoring that report real numbers are a short list.

Setting up the dashboard

Once your hardware is in place, Home Assistant’s Energy dashboard handles the heavy lifting; the long version of that wiring-up lives in building the Home Assistant energy dashboard from scratch. Point it at your grid import/export sensors and your solar production sensor and it calculates your solar offset, tracks daily/monthly consumption, and builds the charts you’d otherwise pay for.

Adding context is where it gets useful. Add the built-in weather integration and you can correlate production drops with cloud cover instead of assuming your panels failed. If you don’t already have a controller, a Home Assistant Green is a clean way to run all of this locally (the Home Assistant Yellow was discontinued in October 2025 and is no longer a new-buy option; these are the Home Assistant hub, not the energy meter itself; Green vs Yellow vs a mini PC walks through that choice).

For automations, you can trigger loads when solar production exceeds consumption (run the dishwasher, charge the EV), or alert yourself when production drops unexpectedly. Practical stuff that lowers your bill.

What you’ll use day to day

After a few months you’ll check three things most days: today’s production, today’s consumption, and the net (what you’re pulling from or pushing to the grid). Weekly and monthly trends matter for validating whether your system size was right, but daily checks take under a minute with a clean dashboard.

One tradeoff: some inverters (certain SolarEdge and Enphase setups) make local data access hard. Depending on model and firmware you may be able to read them via the local Modbus/Envoy local API and a Home Assistant integration; where that’s locked down, a CT-clamp meter (Shelly Pro 3EM or Emporia Vue 3) clamped on the inverter output sidesteps the inverter’s software entirely and keeps everything local.

Quick verdict

For most solar homes: if you have a P1 smart meter, start with the HomeWizard P1 Meter, which has a local API, is dead simple, and is reliable. In the US, or for circuit-level data on a budget, an Emporia Vue 3 flashed with ESPHome gives you many circuits, fully local. If you want a polished CT meter, the Shelly Pro 3EM does clean per-phase mains and solar measurement and the cloud is optional. For per-appliance detail, add a Shelly Plus 2PM - discontinued, so buy its replacement the Shelly 2PM Gen4 - on specific circuits or an Eve Energy plug.

Run it all through Home Assistant and you’ll get better data than the cloud dashboards, own your history, and build automations that respond to your measured production rather than a vendor’s estimate. The upfront setup takes an afternoon.