Rainforest EAGLE-200 Energy Monitoring Smart Meter Gateway and Smart Home Hub

I've been waiting to get my hands on the new Rainforest Eagle-200 since we installed solar panels on our home about 5 months ago. So I ordered it the first day it became available. This unit replaces the original Rainforest Eagle energy gateway. The Eagle-200 makes it very easy to accurately monitor power consumption in real time without wired connections. There's no need to open the electrical service panel to install current sensors. It communicates with the utility's smart meter via the ZigBee wireless protocol. Installation is pretty straight forward. We have Southern California Edison, so as soon as I unboxed it, I went to SCE's website and registered the gateway online. You have to leave the device powered up within 75-feet of the meter while the power company "provisions" it. For us, SCE got the Eagle gateway paired with our smart meter in less than 12-hours. The utility will notify you by email when the unit has been successfully registered. If you haven't already, you should also set up an account with Rainforest Automation. You then connect the device to the internet by Ethernet cable or wirelessly. The Eagle gateway actually broadcasts a WiFi signal that you can connect to with a laptop or smartphone. This allows you to sign in and hand off the wireless connection to your home WiFi. Now you can go to the Rainforest Cloud site to see your energy use in real time. But here's where it got a bit tricky for me. Because the Eagle-200 is brand new, the local and web based user interface for tweaking the settings is still VERY rudimentary. I needed to link the device to Wattvision, a 3rd party energy data processing service. So I contacted Rainforest support for help. They were VERY responsive. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did they answer all of my questions, they even took care of linking the Eagle gateway to my Wattvision account from their end. Everything works perfectly now. Nice!I'll try to update this review after I put some "mileage" on the device. As for right now, I'm impressed. The hardware seems to be very good, but the customer support from Rainforest is "five-stars" outstanding.

Works sometimes.Will break connection to the cloud often and stop reporting data. Doesn't recover on its own when this happens, requires a power cycle. This problem seems to go back to the EAGLE-100 after some searching. (Update: I found tha the local API becomes brain-dead when the device gets in this bad state. The device responds to ping, SSH, and the local API even returns status 200, but the response is empty instead of returning any XML)Both radios are unusable. In my house, both radios have a range of about 20 feet. I ended up attaching the EAGLE to the wall directly opposite to where the power meter is attached at the outside of the house, and running ethernet over a HomePNA adapter back to my router.Their website is quite bad. It frequently breaks requiring a reload. You can only get precise data (~10 second intervals) for the last 5 minutes. The website displays hourly demand for the previous week, and daily demand for the previous month. Since the website is supposed to be the main access point to your data, this product is not terribly useful out of the box.I wanted more precise data so I wrote a Prometheus exporter for it you can find on docker hub / github. Their API is not great; it returns malformed XML, and their XML tag usage is very inconsistent.More worryingly, Rainforest displays blatant disregard for security and privacy.I discovered the WattVision and Skycentrics cloud integrations were sending data over http, not https. I notified Rainforest of this problem and they claimed it is fixed, but I have no desire to send or their associates any more data.It is 2018 folks. If you push or receive private user data over the Internet in plain text, you don't deserve to write any more software.There's also a review on the older Eagle (Rainforest EAGLE Energy Monitor and ZigBee Smart Energy Gateway) detailing how the local security is broken; the SSH version is ancient and the password is simple enough to bruteforce. I verified the SSH version on the Eagle-200 is OpenSSH-6.6, which is 4 years old instead of 12, but I haven't yet tried to brute force the device.However, I did verify that the Eagle-200 maintains an active backdoor VPN connection to Rainforest's servers, just like the Eagle-100. This is not the same thing as pushing data to the cloud. The VPN connection is ONLY used by Rainforest to remotely access your device (and thereby your home network) at their whim.I don't recall signing any agreement giving Rainforest this kind of access to my network. This is the equivalent of PG&E copying the keys to your house, without telling you.The evidence is clear that Rainforest and associates have a disregard for security and privacy that blows Facebook completely out of the water. Worse, the evidence is widespread and historical, indicating the problem is organizational and systemic. I would not accept any fixes, patches or apologies, only a new history of better practices over coming years, before I would trust a Rainforest device on my home network.Sadly, the EAGLE-200 is the only networked meter reader that PG&E allows, and I want access to my data, so I'll still be using this. My plan is to put it on an airgapped network so it has no Internet access, and will collect data via its local API.

This is a great piece of technology. We added solar plus an LG whole house battery back in December. It got me pretty obsessed with power consumption and understanding how my house and family use energy t he iughout the day. While the solar inverter does a really good job at tracking solar production, it is terrible at tracking energy consumption and energy import from the Convicted Felon Pacific Gas and Electric. Usage statistics from Convicted Felon PG&E are often delayed by several days.Setup is pretty simple, although I went with the Ethernet connection as the wifi setup Is a bit of a pain. I did have to call Convicted Felon PG&E several times, but staff in their “Stream my data” call center were very helpful and well trained. I also had to work with Rainforest tech support a bit to get everything setup, and they were wonderful.This product could be easier to use and it could offer a bit more customization in displaying energy use metrics. That said, once you get it working it’s a very useful and interesting tool for monitoring hourly, daily and monthly energy use. It’s very cool to get the data straight from the meter.

The EAGLE-200 is easy to setup. Went smoothly along with the PG&E setup web interface ("Stream data")But after gathering and showing my usage for 2 hours it would disconnect every hours or so. I ended up contacting the Rainforest support. They responded within one business day and mentioned the device failed to update its firmware automatically. After they forced an update it seemed stable. Problem solved in less than one day. That was 2 weeks ago, since then no problem at all. I can see my live electric usage, and historical data per hour, day, week or month. No need for a 3rd party could tracking.