Electricity Monitor Installation Tips
![Whole-house Electricity Monitor Installation Tips [photo By Allison Bailes]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/electricity-monitor-installation-tips.jpeg)
In the past four years, I’ve installed five electricity monitors in my electrical panels. (One was a re-installation after a major electrical upgrade during my basement renovation.) Two of those installations were in my 200 amp main panel (before and after the renovation), two in sub-panels, and one in the small panel below the new meter (photo above). The instructions that come with these monitors rarely tell you how to deal with the peculiarities you might find at your house. And since I had a few peculiarities to deal with, I’ve got a few electricity monitor installation tips for you here.
Caution: This article describes working inside electrical panels and is for informational purposes only. It describes my experience and is not professional advice. Energy Vanguard is not responsible for injury, property damage, or other consequences resulting from anyone attempting similar work. Electrical codes vary by jurisdiction, so check your local requirements and consult a licensed professional before doing your own panel work.
1. Start with circuit mapping
The first of my electricity monitor installation tips isn’t even about installing the monitor. Before you open up your electrical panel, it’s best to know what loads each of your circuits includes. In an older home—like my 1961 ranch—you can’t trust what may be written on the panel door. And if the house is a few decades old, there likely have been some modifications.
I spent a weekend chasing down all the loads and assigning them to circuits. I put all of the info in a spreadsheet with several tabs so I could organize in different ways. See my circuit mapping article for details.
2. If it don’t fit, don’t force it
Electricity monitors include several components. There’s the little box, the monitor itself, that everything plugs into. Then you have all the current transformers (CTs) that clamp onto the wires to measure the current in each circuit. To get power and energy, you also need to know the voltage, so there’s a wire harness that measures voltage and phase as well as powering the monitor. Then to get the data to you, there’s an antenna that allows the monitor to connect to your wifi.
![When an electrical panel doesn't have room for everything, you can install a separate box for the monitor itself. [photo by Allison Bailes]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/electricity-monitor-with-separate-enclosure.jpeg)
3. Mind your pigtails
In electrical wiring, a pigtail is usually how you connect more than one wire to an outlet, breaker, or other electrical component. You connect the relevant wires and another short piece of wire in a wire nut. Then you use the other end of the short wire to connect to, in this case, the breaker. The photo below shows two pigtails I put in my heat pump sub-panel.
![Pigtails and fat wires don't go together well. [Photo by Allison Bailes]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/electricity-monitor-pigtails-annotated.jpeg)
4. Sometimes you need to add a breaker
In my heat pump sub-panel, there was only one breaker with small enough wire for a pigtail. But I needed two so I could measure the voltage in both the A and the B legs from the two mains coming into the sub-panel. And in my panel beneath the electric meter, there were no small wires.
So I added an additional 20 amp breaker in the heat pump sub-panel and two 20 amp breakers in the meter panel. That gave me what I needed to measure everything properly (at a cost of ~$7 per breaker).
5. Neutrals and AFCI breakers
If you connect the power and voltage wires for your electricity monitor to an arc-fault circuit interrupter (AFCI) breaker, you have to do something different than what the instructions tell you. Now, here I need to describe the wire harness. It has 4 wires: white, black, red, and blue.
- White — neutral
- Black — power for the monitor + voltage and phase sensing
- Red and blue — voltage and phase sensing
They say to connect the white wire to the neutral bus bar. Unfortunately, that causes a problem if the black, red, or blue wires are connected to an AFCI breaker and the neutral wire to the neutral bus bar. In my case, I had the red and blue wires connected to an AFCI breaker, which would trip as soon as I turned the power on.
I checked with Refoss, and they told me to connect the neutral wire to the AFCI breaker. And since it already has the neutral for that circuit connected to it, you’ll need a pigtail there, too.
Of course, an alternative, if you have space in the panel, is to add regular breakers just for the monitor, as described in step 4.
6. What’s the buzz?
If you hear a strange buzzing during or after your installation, you may have done the same thing I did. When I was troubleshooting the problem described in the next section, I unplugged a CT to plug it into a different port in the monitor. That’s when the buzzing started.
Refoss doesn’t specify, but the buzz tells me these are current-output CTs. So if you have the CT clamped onto a wire carrying current, you can get a shock by pinching the jack at the other end of the CT. (And yes, I think I did feel a little tingle.)
The takeaway here is that you should plug in the jack before clamping the CT on the wire. And do that in reverse—unclamp the CT before removing the jack—when disconnecting.
7. Check the numbers if you can
Now, for my troubleshooting fun. The electricity monitor installed on my meter panel gives me all the big numbers: the power going to the 200 amp main panel, the power going to the heat pump sub-panel, and the power coming from my photovoltaic array‘s inverter. The solar power, though, didn’t agree with my solar app. Also, each leg should be carrying the same current.
![Incorrect reading on one leg of my solar power measurement [Photo by Allison Bailes]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/electricity-monitor-solar-power-incorrect-v2.jpeg)
![Reading the current with a clip-on ammeter is another electricity monitor installation tip [Photo by Allison Bailes]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/ammeter-reading-solar-current-black-red-wire-v2.jpg)
Caution: The meter panel is the only of my four panels that can’t be fully de-energized. When the 200 A breaker at the top is off, the lugs and conductors above the breaker still carry voltage. There is a cover to prevent accidental contact, but you should be aware that you aren’t working on a completely dead panel unless you call your electric company to come pull the meter.
Also, the solar inverter should stop sending power to this panel shortly after flipping the 200 A breaker, but it’s a good practice to turn that breaker off, too. And once you’ve turned off the breakers, verify with a meter that it’s really de-energized.
What electricity monitor installation tips do you have?
I’ve given you seven electricity monitor installation tips based on my experience with five installations. You may not run into all the issues I’ve had with mine, and maybe you’ve got some other ones. If you do, I’d love to read them in the comments below.
Allison A. Bailes III, PhD is a speaker, writer, building science consultant, and the founder of Energy Vanguard in Decatur, Georgia. He has a doctorate in physics and is the author of a bestselling book on building science. He also writes the Energy Vanguard Blog. For more updates, you can follow Allison on LinkedIn and subscribe to Energy Vanguard’s weekly newsletter and YouTube channel.
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Consider issuing a blog in the future about Ting Monitor-like electrical monitors, their benefits, shortcomings, etc.
I’ve had a Ting, courtesy of State Farm Insurance, for a couple years…meh. Its weekly reports confirm that my electric utility has good days…and not so good days. That said, it sometimes mis-characterizes a very short lights-flicker < 1 second dip as a 5-7 minute outage, only because that's how long our internet box takes to restore comms after losing power, however briefly.
I wish there was a way to access the extremely granular data Ting claims to gather, but their weekly reports are all that is available without some fairly heavy DIY lifting (hardware and software, according to AI, anyway).
I'm researching whether upgrading my solar system to incorporate Sol-Ark hybrid inverters and a beefy DC coupled battery system would improve both power reliability and quality at home.
In a possibly somewhat related vein, we recently had an LCD TV fail almost catastrophically…a fair bit of smoke and fire as the thing suddenly expired. I checked the Ting report for that time and there were no apparent power anomalies.
Interestingly, (and somewhat irksomely) the fancy combination AFCI breaker now-required at $10x the cost of the old standards cared not a wit about the energetic and violent passing of our old TV!
Naturally this engineer tends to succumb to "paralysis by analysis" when confronted by the need to replace a technically complicated device…except that my dear spouse folds laundry while watching TV, so the day I ran out of clean socks saw me to Best Buy…
FWIW, I have installed a trio of Emporia Vue monitors on my home’s panels, and I have run into some of the issues you described. One neat feature of the Emporia ecosystem is it integrates so called smart outlets, so I was able to skip the CT / pigtail hassle for a half dozen or so major plug loads. That said, Emporia advises against plugging refrigerators into their smart outlets in case of inadvertent shut off ruining a fridge full of food – I took that advice and went with CTs on the fridges.
A major feature that drove me to Emporia (pun intended) is Emporia’s ability to modulate the output of their EV charger so that it harvests only excess solar. I do use that feature, but only on clear sunny days. Unfortunately those are rare during Florida’s hot cloudy summers.
The problem with Emporia Excess Solar during partly cloudy weather is that it cycles their charger completely off for 3 minutes whenever excess solar drops below ~1500 Watts, and that excessive cycling of the car’s charger relays strikes me as too risky for daily use. I’ve suggested to Emporia that they provide an option to hold the charger at minimum power (6 Amps) rather than shutting it off when excess solar drops out, but they have yet to implement that request.
On balance, I’m fairly pleased with Emporia. I have Emporia CTs on both our solar PV inverters, and their app processes the “negative” load fairly well with data much more granular than the Fronius inverter app.
The AFCI tip is a good one, and it catches people who do this for a living too. We run a job board for traveling electricians, and when a journeyman moves to another state for work, the panels there may have been wired under a different code edition than the one they learned on, so AFCI and neutral rules don’t always match habit. Your note about checking local requirements first is the right call, since most states require a license to do panel work for pay on somebody else’s house. For anyone wondering where that line sits, we keep a page on which states license electricians and what it takes to work there.