Can I make a sensor that has data from the past?

Third party integrations
1

I want to make a custom integration that imports data from local power provider (bchydro) at least until i get one of the power montiors installed. After playing with the data available from their site it looks like things are done in hourly increments and at least lagging by 2 hours.

Is there are a way I can make the sensor set the value for the entire hour, and have it done in the past? I mostly want to be able see what i have on during high periods. And ideally be able to pull data into the energy dashboard. I do have the code working for fetching data into a sensor, just not sure if possible to backfill.

Rough first pass - GitHub - halkeye/homeassistant_bchydro: Plugin to pull data from bchydro website.

Gavin

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2

You mean you want this sensor to lag in time?
I believe I have read that is not possible.

But what you could do is to have your own power meter lag with two hours.
You just need to set up a sensor to duplicate the values from two hours ago, that way you will have the electric company’s and your lagging sensor show the “same” data.

3

If I had any idea how to do that to existing sensors. I’d have to do that for each and every plug and other power reporting sensor I had right? It would work, but i don’t think its worth the effort personally.

4

I see… I thought you had a CT clamp on the incoming line.
You probably could do it in one go, but the calculation would be very CPU intensive (I assume) so it would probably not be realistic

5

eventually. I am really excited about the idea, but logistics of buying it, and installing it, and everything means it probably wont be in the short term, and I can do software anytime.

6

In case you still want to try then the way I thought of doing this “timeshift” was with Node red.

Inject → get entities node, where you filter out the entities to loop (power reporting entities) → get history node → function node, where you loop the sensor data backwards until you get to 2 hours back and grab this value as the new value → Entity node, that saves the data to a new sensor.

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7

Why not simply inject the data at the appropriate place in the database.

8

I can look into that after work, but can you point me to any examples/info?

9

I am not sure this is possible (maybe it should be) but I feel this would be an ideal use for the History Stats. My thoughts would be to set the start time to now() - 2 hours, with a duration of maybe 1 minute or so. Reading through the documents and It is not clear if it is possible but, like I said, this would be a great use case.

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