In most situations, your utility provider will give you a bill at the end of a billing cycle outlining your electrical usage. Those values would be shown in kWh, usually tied to a specific rate or cost per kWh of energy consumed. To compare your energy monitor measurements against those utility provider measurements can be helpful to make sure you're capturing all of your consumption data properly, and using the CSV exported data can help with that.

First step is just to make sure your energy monitor is setup and working. The important setting we'll want to focus on here is to make sure your energy monitor is setup with the same time zone setting as the utility provider to ensure we're comparing the appropriate time frames together.

Once that is ready to go, you'll be able to export your data to CSV. That'll send you a link to your email address (tied to the Emporia account) with a download link. Feel free to download that .zip file and it should contain a few files of CSV data. If your utility provider bills day-to-day, then using the 1-DAY file of data should work great. If your utility provider has partial days worth of usage counted as part of the billing cycle, then using the 1-HOUR data file might be more accurate.

For this example, I will be using Google Sheets to calculate the CSV data with, but the CSV should be workable through Excel or other spreadsheet programs if you'd be more comfortable with those.

First, you'll want to sum up the "mains" sensors together. In my example I have 2x 200A CT's (for a typical split-phase system). I also like to insert columns next to the data I'm working with, so I've added a new column to the right of my last 200A CT measurement. Within that column, I will sum together the two columns to the left to get a "Total Usage" number which should match the Emporia Energy app measurements for the same time period.

Once we have a column for our "total" - we can then add up the individual time records (days or hours) that'll match the same monitoring period as stated by the utility provider for their measurement time period. Ideally - we should be within +/- 2% of what the utility provider would be recording for the same time period. If not, it might suggest a monitoring situation where we're missing usage or measuring inaccurately.

Feedback and Suggestions

This knowledge base is pretty new for the Emporia team. Our goal is to provide all of the information we can to help you manage your energy in better ways. If this article wasn't helpful, or we could be more clarifying on any points please reach out to the Customer Support team and we'll certainly work to improve these guides.