Efergy Elite Classic Whole Home Power Monitor Review

For those concerned with the power usage of their home while they are away or want to conserve energy or more importantly your hard earned money, products offering a solution are few and far between. All is not lost as Efergy has recently released the Elite Classic that offers a basic solution to fit this need.

The Elite classic is the latest revision of Efergy's Elite wireless power monitor. After a few simple steps to setup the device, this solution allows users to monitor their entire home electricity usage, and as this unit has a refresh rate of 10s, you can see instantly the impact of turning devices on and off.

Features include real-time energy consumption listed in cost, CO2 and kWh. This solution also keep a history so you can monitor your usage over time and to keep the monitor out of the way it's wall mountable with a 320 ft. range. MSRP of the Efergy Elite Classic is listed at $119.99 with a one-year warranty.

Product packaging for the Elite Classic carries an image of the monitor at the bottom left. To the right, we have marketing information along with a claim of up to 20% off your electricity cost.

The back of the packaging has instruction on how to install the power monitor. At the bottom is a list of what you will find in the box.

Above, we have the kit in its entirety. It's worth mentioning they sent over the UK solution and that's what we have above. The US kit comes with 2 XL clamps which we did receive from Efergy for testing.

The sensor or amp clamp is a rather simple device. You simply clamp this onto your main power coming into your home and then connect the output into the transmitter in the next image. Cord length is ample at about 3 ft.

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Above we have the transmitter. This device consumes three AA batteries and connects up to three sensors at the base.

As mentioned above, you can connect up to three sensors to each transmitter.

Here we have a look at the large display for the kit. This is a three line LCD screen with a green backlight.

The back of this device allows you to mount it on the wall. Power is supplied via the 5v input to the left or four AA batteries.

The top of the unit has several controls including mode/set, history and directional control for navigating the screen.

Above, we have the display lit up via its backlight. As you can see, the top line of the LCD shows up to date power consumption, while the second shows the cost. The third line shows both temperature and humidity.

Over the past two months I have used the Efergy Elite Classic in my own home, to get a feel for how well the unit works. First, I should mention that I did have problems with the unit initially not staying connected, or not showing data from both sensors. After a few emails back and forth with Efergy, we had it sorted and all has been well since.

While this power monitoring solution is a basic setup, it does offer quite a bit of information for users to get an idea of what their home consumes and then adjust their patterns to save money. The large display of the unit is very easy to read and the backlight certainly helps in low light situations. Of course, the backlight doesn't stay on all the time, but it does give you a 10 second window before shutting off. If you need more time, you can always push the center button on the top of the unit to turn it back on.

Battery life is claimed to be 12 months minimum if you use 2400mAh batteries, and as mentioned, you can use a 5v power adapter for the display unit. With that said, the most intriguing feature of the Efergy Elite Classic is the unit's ability to log your power data and keep records of your average power usage which you can then look at by hour, week or month.