Smart Breaker Data Hub - Connect Wirelessly or with Ethernet

at first it was going well...installed. Then started the configuration...when I got to setup WIFi it bricked. Tried to factory reset... said I didn't have Bluetooth on my phone enabled. Tried my wives phone. Same thing. No response from Leviton support.UPDATE: Leviton got a hold of me. Walked me through and got it working. Very good tech.

One out of 3 would not make a WIFI connection to my network. Manufacturer replaced. Installation is finicky if you don't have a knockout located in the right place in your load center (need a hole saw).My main issue and the reason these aren't worth the exorbitant price, especially considering each WIFI breaker is also more expensive, is that the app does not provide for any exporting of data. You have to manually go into the app and record each breaker's data by month, week or day. This seems like a simple software fix since the data is in the cloud and I have requested it from Leviton a couple of times. Hopefully, it will be available at some point.

The media could not be loaded.  I do not recommend the Leviton Load Center. Do not waste your money.Despite slick marketing and apparently a lot of research and development, these smart breakers are among the worst products that Leviton has produced. All of the smart breakers (I tested LB120-DS, LB120-GS, LB120-AS, LB120-S, LB220-S, LB230-S, and LB260-GS) emit a distinct and nauseating hissing noise when they are energized, even when the breaker itself is in the OFF position. The hissing noise is comprised of at least three components: a generic white noise, a high-pitched squeal, and rapid clicking at a rate of maybe 20 to 30 clicks per second. Just one breaker is annoying enough, but if you have a whole load center full of 20-40 of these breakers, it is like living with a brood of vipers.Because of this hissing, I was unable to complete the installation and get the LDATA into the panel. LDATA is pointless without smart breakers, and smart breakers are pointless without LDATA.When the load center cover LDC42-W is on, the hissing is muffled, but is still plainly audible for at least 9 to 12 feet. When the cover is off, the breakers are audible from 40 feet away and through at least one open doorway. There is no excuse for this poor design, because standard breakers that only cost a couple of dollars never emit any sound in the first place.I invested several thousand dollars into this equipment, only to find out about this hissing after the LP422-ML load center was fully installed and wired by my electricians. What a waste of money.No other breakers on the market that I am aware of exhibit this annoying hiss. Furthermore, Leviton's non-smart breakers (LB120, LB115, LSPD2, etc.) do not emit any noise whatsoever. The whole point of the Leviton smart load center, however, is to get the smart breakers, not the standard ones. The standard breakers do not make this load center competitive because the load center itself is much more expensive, the standard breakers are still twice the price of other vendors' breakers, and other vendors' breakers are widely available at every electrical supply house around the country. I am so disgusted with Leviton's engineering on this hissing issue that I do not consider the standard (non-smart) breakers to be much of a workaround. It would give me greater peace of mind to return everything and get another vendor's products, even if it means paying my electricans to rewire a new panel.I hope that Leviton takes this matter seriously, recalls its faulty inventory, and redesigns its smart breakers as soon as possible. For a product that is intended to be installed indoors in a residential environment, the only acceptable noise signature is 0dB (no noise). There is absolutely no excuse to charge consumers 3-6x more for breakers that pollute a residential environment with noise like this.Most likely the hissing is coming from AC-DC transformer components inside each breaker to power the radio circuitry, which a Leviton representative told me is Bluetooth-based. This design is clearly shortsighted because each breaker needs a Bluetooth radio and AC-DC transformer, which adds to the cost of each breaker. It would have been far better, more efficient, and less costly to have a low voltage DC supply bus with a single, high-quality transformer in the panel itself (or attached to the panel) that has zero noise emission. Second, there could have been a simple wired data bus that connects between the breakers and the LDATA data hub. In theory there is an isolation advantage by using Bluetooth: in the event of a power surge, the surge would not travel over the data bus to blow out the data hub. However, that argument is a total red herring because LDATA itself is supposed to be powered by the same panel. A catastrophic power surge like a lighting strike will definitely take out everything in the panel anyway. Using Bluetooth just pollutes the 2.4GHz space in the immediate vicinity of the panel.I originally decided to go with the Leviton Smart Load Center because I wanted to upgrade my house to have 24+ circuits, but most home energy monitoring products are capped at 14 to 16 circuits max (examples: Emporia Vue and IoTaWatt). I also found the vast number of CT clamps required by such products in a panel to be excessive and untidy. I eliminated AI-based home energy monitors (examples: Neurio and Sense) because I did not want to babysit an algorithm for months at a time with no guarantee when my devices might randomly appear. At this stage of the Leviton product, however, any of the aforementioned products are better than the Leviton Load Center.Another negative is that Leviton still has not exposed any local network or cloud-based interfaces to monitor and control the system. This was a known limitation before I purchased the product, but I thought that there was a project on GitHub to scrape the Android REST API calls to the MyLeviton Cloud service. I was unable to find such a project while writing this review. The data belongs to the homeowner; there is no credible reason (other than laziness) why this data cannot be exposed locally. Leviton absolutely needs to make this data available on the local network with appropriate access control measures if it wants a useful product.Leviton had a real opportunity to disrupt load center design, and they totally blew it. Forget this product and get something—anything—else.

I recommend this product if you find the limited energy detail on your monthly energy bill already more than adequate. If you want something more in depth consider other options. I'm just so disappointed with the Leviton smart breaker system right now.I'm primarily interested in "live" or sub-minute energy usage monitoring of our house to be able to determine how much say our water heater circuit is costing us over the course of day or all the computer servers powered on our office circuit.There exist other products to clamp to your house's main power feeds and some even analyze waveforms to help you determine which specific devices are on and drawing power. However I always thought those were "best effort" products and that a per-breaker solution would clearly be ideal, right? Enter Leviton's Smart Panel system, begone the hassle of clumsy current sensing clamps as they're built into the breakers! When it came time to upgrade our 1974 breaker panel we chose to go with Leviton and installed their LP420-MB panel, this LPDATA Smart Hub, and a couple of Leviton Smart Breakers (in a mix of mostly "dumb" breakers) to test things out. However, after installation and setting things up I'm worried my vision doesn't line up with Leviton's. =(Immediately upon setup I was let down. The only mention of my instantaneous energy usage on a circuit is to click several times through the app to the breaker details. Only then if you look closer lower in the view you'll see "Current 5.2". (Presumably it's in amps but the unit is not actually labeled, just a little sloppy.) Instead the app is set up to present information like an electrical bill where the most detail you'll get is a single daily kWh sum per breaker, lame. You can set your price for $/kWh but it will only calculate dollar cost for the sum of all breakers not individual circuits and if you live in an area where prices are tiered or change time of day you're out of luck. There isn't any way to get a graph of kWh over the course of a day and whatever limited data there is clunky. I feel buyer's remorse. What have I gotten us into? I thought a system where each breaker contains an entire system on a chip dedicated to just that circuit would achieve amazing statistics like live watt usage and detailed responsive charts and who knows what. Ha, nope! You get a daily bar chart, *and* that's only after jumping through hoops in poor app UI to find them.Speaking of UI, you'd think after dropping hundreds of dollars to kit-out your panel you'd be rewarded with clear user experience biased towards bringing forward all the data of the devices you just invested in. No, instead you get pestered to "add more devices" because the My Leviton software is trying to do many things at once. "Aren't you sure you don't want to add your Leviton Dimmer Switch or maybe your Leviton Fan Speed Controller??" I can hear the app asking me. What this means is after adding the load center in the app (btw I can't use my plugged-in active ethernet connection for this, wi-fi only??) you're unceremoniously dumped back into the bland home page and you're left to figure out yourself that you need to start the breaker scan yourself. Assuming you got that far cross your fingers as the scan process itself might not actually find your breakers (literally sitting right next to the hub!) on the first pass-- if this happens try turning off the smart breakers, started a new scan, and turned them back on at which point they were found.In the end I at least still trust the Leviton breakers will do their job and reliably deliver electricity and trip when needed. But this hub, what a disappointment. I mean yes you do at least get daily kWh use per-breaker that seems to be accurate based on my past Kill-A-Watt measurements. And you can trip the breaker remotely (though walk to the panel to turn the breaker back on). But that's pretty much it. Leviton also gets points for having my.leviton.com be available in a browser so you're not stuck always using an app.Maybe there's hope that the current lack of live energy use and awkward UX will be fixed in future updates. This is a relatively new product for Leviton so maybe they're still working things out? A feature roadmap would help see where they're going but I won't hold my breath for one of those. Don't get me started on if you can even export this data to Home Assistant or if there's an API exposed to offline the data for other purposes.Attached images:1. After you set up your smart breaker this is what your profile's default view looks like, yuck.2. Click around a bit (or on "Manage" then "Panel View") you can find the panel view. Here I've added the two smart breakers, no dumb breakers added yet3. Click on a breaker and this is what you get, yawn.4. Click on "Usage" and then "Daily" and you can finally see today's summed energy use. No graph, just a bar chart.2/24/2021 1 week update. I learned via exploration that you can actually see per-breaker cost for a time period if you click Manage > Panel View > Consumption. It's a weird UI where the bars make no graphical sense but the dollar amount is at least correct. I'm still disappointed overall but this helps.

The product itself feels well built and easy to install. My problem is the functionality is severely lacking. This only allows you to turn off specific breakers and gives you a power use breakdown by breaker (not necessarily live data either) and only works for circuits that have a smart breaker installed which is ~$100 more than a normal breaker.Hopefully Leaviton adds proper load shedding abilities (i.e. if power usage exceeds a total of X Amps, you should be able to prioritize what circuits should momentarily be deactivated), even circuit scheduling (i.e. between x and y time each day turn off circuit z), or even circuit priority for homes with battery/generator back up (i.e. if main power goes out, turn off all circuits except for specific ones such as fridge/freezers).As of this review (June 2023) it's hard to recommend the upgrade of this and smart breakers as the functionality is very limited. Until Leaviton realizes the potential of a truly smart panel this it is a waste of money.