If, like me, you’re up for replacing your home breakers (power breakers and earth leakage) you may have come across the EARU Electric EAMPDW-TY-63 on AliExpress. I just came across a couple of these with no manual or box. I just HAPPEN to know they are (not uncommonly) Tuya-compatible – i.e. the TUYA or Smartlife APP – I prefer to use the latter.
Armed with that knowledge, I decided to set these up and immediately hit the problem of reading through countless sales sites with no or inaccurate setup info followed by countless so-called “manuals” sites which at best are absolutely littered with adverts. If this is your experience, let me save you some hassle.
These DIN-RAIL-MOUNT devices will run on 120v to 250v (I’m running right now in the UK on around 240v). My primary interest initially was earth leakage as I go back and forth between 2 countries – so an old-fashioned earth leakage device that needs manually resetting is no good to me. Also I need to monitor it’s state on my smartphone (Android in my case) so I know if it’s on or off.
First things first, these devices have the usual live and neutral IN at the top and live and neutral OUT at the bottom. As you’ll see in the photo, they have 4 buttons and 5 lights which can be confusing at first. It doesn’t help that the lettering is tiny and not always consistent. Essentially from left to right, you have SET, UP, DOWN, POWER. The SET button allows you to view values and doubles up with a 5-second press (not finger nails as I bust one doing that) to go into SET mode – then short press to what it is you want to set, using UP and DOWN buttons to change the value if required – followed by SET.
The DOWN button doubles up with a 5 second press to let you set the WIFI. For WiFi you should have the SmartLife APP (registered to you) running and add (+ a device) in this case (after you’ve registered the program) by making sure you are on the HOME tab and hitting that +, then ADD DEVICE, ENERGY, SMART METER (WIFI).
You should at this point connect the top 2 connectors to mains live and neutral (carefully – don’t do any of this unless you are comfortable with high voltage power safety) – no need for output and no need to have the unit mounted in a DINRAIL right now. With power applied, after maybe 30 seconds you’ll hear the relay click on.
The only active light is likely to be the WiFi light indicating you’ve not set up the device to your WIFI access point. Make sure your phone is on your 2.4Ghz (not 5Ghz – won’t work) Wifi access point… and when you select that SMART METER (Wifi) option you’ll see the WiFi info and a NEXT option. Ensure the right WIFi access point and password is inserted if not pre-filled. Hit NEXT, Confirm… it will then tell you to press and hold the RESET button for 5 secs (there IS no obvious reset button – it’s that DOWN button). Do that unless the WiFi light is already flashing quickly. In the end – “Connecting device” should, after several seconds, confirm you’ve added the device.
For me, after 01:10 minutes, no joy so I backed up a notch – and pressed that DOWN button and tried again – this time “1 device added successfully”. “Cellar aircon” – that’s not what it was supposed to say. Probably as someone used it before me – the device in this case was not new.
Anyway it works. Rename….
You can set some parameters in the APP or all on the device. To me anyway it seemed easiest to set up the various parameters on the device as this would presumably be a one-off job – sitting at my desk as against some dark fusebox.
I’ve not shown here but in the APP you can access instantaneous and historical power consumption and more.
Going through the settings, I set minimum voltage to 180v, maximum 270v, maximum current 50A (you only get a few seconds to do this before the device goes back to normal mode) and leakage to 30ma. The NEXT setting isn’t exactly self-explanatory and said simply “30” – that’s how many seconds the power output will stay off when the earth leakage trips or the unit is first switched on.
What this unit does NOT give you which others (e.g. Taxnele) do, is control over how many times you’d like it to retry after an earth leakage event. That’s a little worrying as I’d like it to try, say, 3 times before giving up – after all there COULD be a serious leakage problem which needs manual intervention rather than keep trying forever, every 30 seconds. I could be out of the country for months before being able to get back and intervene.
Anyway, these two units work, it’ll be interesting to see how well the WiFi performs in a metal fusebox, I wish they’d offer an external antenna option.
I should clarify finally that these units DO appear in Home Assistant if you are using the latter.
Caviat: I’ve found it imposible to contact Earu up to now (no contact page or email) unlike Sonoff and others who are readily contactable – on breakers – I found it easy to contact Taxnele.