Most solar failures are silent — the system just stops, and the first you hear of it is the utility bill. The Vue energy monitor shows production, consumption and grid flow live, second by second. $799 installed by our licensed electricians, no subscription.
We respond within 1 business hour.
Solar fails quietly. An inverter trips after a grid surge, a breaker opens, a connector gives up in the heat — and the panels sit there looking exactly the same as the day they worked. Nothing beeps. In our service work, the most common answer to “when did it stop producing?” is nobody knows.
In Arizona that ignorance is expensive in a specific way: the system that quietly dies in June is discovered in August, two peak cooling months later, when the utility bill lands. By then the money is gone.
Monitoring converts that story into a same-day alert. It is also the single most useful thing to have in place before anything breaks, because a repair conversation that starts with data — production history, the day it stopped, which leg dropped — ends faster and cheaper than one that starts with a guess.
The Vue is a whole-home energy monitor that installs inside your electrical panel. Two 200-amp sensors clamp the mains; smaller 50-amp sensors clamp individual breakers you want to watch. It reads with roughly ±2% accuracy, reports every second over your WiFi, and shows everything in a clean phone app.
One limitation, stated plainly because it separates people who install this product from people who resell it: the sensors read the AC side. The Vue measures what your inverter actually delivers to the house — it cannot see individual panels on the DC side. For knowing whether your system works, what it produces and what you use, the AC side is the number that matters.
Watching the numbers is the start; the Vue also acts on them. It manages time-of-use rates — a real lever on APS and SRP plans, where the same kilowatt-hour costs several times more at 5 PM than at noon — and can hold your peak demand down, which is the number demand-rate plans actually bill on.
It also connects to the wider Emporia ecosystem: smart plugs, EV chargers, batteries and thermostats can respond to what your solar is producing. The obvious Arizona play is charging the car or running the pool pump on excess solar instead of exporting it for pennies and buying it back at peak.
Notifications close the loop — production drops, unusual draw, even the oven left on. Emporia's own figure is that the average homeowner saves 10% or more monthly; in our experience the fastest savings show up the first week, when the app makes one appliance's habit visible.
The Vue lives in your main panel next to the service conductors — this is licensed electrical work, not a gadget install. Our electricians mount it, land the sensors, verify every reading against the meter, and hand you a working app before leaving the driveway.
Monitor, main sensors, standard branch sensors, licensed electrical installation, WiFi connection, meter verification and app setup. About an hour on site.
$40 per additional monitored circuit — put the AC, pool or EV charger on its own line. $90 WiFi extender if your panel sits outside router range.
Monitoring caught a drop? The $199 diagnostic finds the cause and quotes the fix.
Old monitoring went dark and you cannot tell if the system is down? Start here.
Gradual production loss with no fault code is often birds, not equipment.
