Custom Component: IoTaWatt Energy Monitor integration

[mihalski (Michal Dobrzynski)]

At some stage in the last few days the integration stopped working correctly for me.

At least for the energy dashboard. On about December the 16th to be more specific. Not sure what changed at that time.

@firstof9 How about yours?

What makes things more confusing is that solar and grid seem to be calculating correctly but none of the circuits iotawatt is monitoring are being calculated correctly anymore. And on top of that two of the sensors that have stopped recording correctly in the energy dashboard aren’t even from the iotawatt integration

i.e. Study and Family Room are both Tasmota based smart plugs with energy monitoring.

[firstof9]

Everything’s fine here:

[mihalski (Michal Dobrzynski)]

I can’t figure out what’s going on but here is why my integration currently looks like.

Five days ago:

Thereafter nothing. Four days ago onward. None of the Iotawatt measurements work:

[mihalski (Michal Dobrzynski)]

For the first time in almost 2 years since installing the IotaWatt I was forced to go to the garage and power cycle it… I could ping it but not access the webui and it wasn’t feeding data to Home Assistant. I hope all this doesn’t mean that its dying.

[ogiewon]

@mihalski

I hope all this doesn’t mean that its dying.

Probably not dying… I know there was an issue recently with a specific firmware update (v2.0.8, IIRC) that negatively impacted some recently shipped units that contained a specific model of microSD memory card. This led the IoTaWatt team to revert all units back to the previous firmware as a safety precaution.

Inside an IoTaWatt is an off-the-shelf NodeMCU ESP8266 microcontroller, plugged into a socket on the mainboard. Should this ever fail, it is pretty easy to replace. Also, there is a microSD memory card which maintains the historical energy usage data. It is possible that this microSD memory card could wear out over time, although I am not aware of this being a common issue with the IoTaWatt.

Hopefully, your IoTaWatt will continue to behave well for many more years to come!

[firstof9]

This is why I also monitor the firmware version, Hz, wifi rssi, and RTC battery, if my Hz goes wonky or flat lines I know comms are down.

EDIT: yes I corrected the spelling mistake

[kramttocs]

I know this has been discussed a couple times in this thread at least. I am needing to rename my ‘outputs’ since the IoTaWatt UI limits the characters. With two units I want to prepend the unit name onto it. I see a report of the HACS version being different but haven’t tried it. Do they show as sensors in that one that I can edit?

[OzGav]

If anyone else is getting a warning about the component being disabled in 2023.3 it looks like you can fix it by changing line 16 in init.py to
await hass.config_entries.async_forward_entry_setups(entry, PLATFORMS)

I have opened a PR but no activity there for a couple of years

[jyavenard (Jean-Yves Avenard)]

is that on the official integration or the custom one. The latter can be considered stale I think

[OzGav]

custom. I’m still using it as I hate change

[wattmatters]

Can anyone help me with how to install this custom integration? I’m a bit lost.

The “official” HA IotaWatt integration is dead, so trying to find another way to integrate IotaWatt data into HA. Stumbled upon this custom option.

I can see this after adding the custom repository:

I downloaded and restarted HA but this is all I see.

I’m lost on where to from here.

Thanks!

[jyavenard (Jean-Yves Avenard)]

@wattmatters

The “official” HA IotaWatt integration is dead, so trying to find another way to integrate IotaWatt data into HA. Stumbled upon this custom option.

uh what?

since when?
working fine here

[wattmatters]

@jyavenard

uh what?

since when?

It ran for a day, then died and now the integration refuses to reload. Since that’s a different integration and OT for this thread, here’s the link on that. Seems I am not alone with this problem and there does not appear to be a solution for it:

IoTaWatt Stopped Working in HA and Integration Now Fails

I experienced this exact same problem and I don’t know how to resolve. Looking for some help. The integration loaded OK to begin with, then a day later it died, all the sensors became unavailable. I don’t know why it died. My Iotawatt communicates just fine via it’s own system, has good Wi-Fi signal (RSSI of -55 give or take). [Screen_Shot_2023-03-23_at_11_54_44_am] So I deleted it and tried reloading but it refuses to load the integration. [Screen Shot 2023-03-23 at 11.46.06 am] or if I…

[sparkydave (🇦🇺 Dave)]

After installing it in HACS you then need to go to Setting > Devices & Services > Add Integration > Look up IotaWatt (custom one) > follow the prompts.

[Eoin]

Worth noting the thread you have referenced is a year old, I’m not aware of any recent issues with the core integration and it’s still working fine for me. Might we worth checking your DNS settings.

[wattmatters]

@sparkydave

After installing it in HACS you then need to go to Setting > Devices & Services > Add Integration > Look up IotaWatt (custom one) > follow the prompts.

Thanks. This one won’t load either.

I’ve tried the static IP address assigned to my IotaWatt and also http://iotawatt.local as well.

It just gives me an unhelpful error message:

@Eoin

Worth noting the thread you have referenced is a year old, I’m not aware of any recent issues with the core integration and it’s still working fine for me. Might we worth checking your DNS settings.

Thanks. I don’t really know what “checking your DNS settings” means. I looked it up although I’m not the much wiser for it.

I searched my router’s admin portal and see it has a couple of IP addresses listed as DNS servers but there is no option to edit them.

[sparkydave (🇦🇺 Dave)]

I just had a quick look and the custom integration kinda seems abandoned. Before swapping to the core integration I was using rest sensors instead and that worked really well, I’ve even been thinking of going back to them as they seemed to respond quicker to changes in the sensor values.

Here was my old code in a package file.

iotawatt.yaml

###   Connection to read power data from IoTaWatt Power Monitor

sensor:
  - platform: rest
    name: IoTaWatt
    json_attributes:
      - inputs
      - outputs
    resource: http://192.168.0.16/status?inputs=yes&outputs=yes
    value_template: '{{ value_json.inputs[0].Vrms }}v'
    scan_interval: 5

  - platform: template
    sensors:
      iotawatt_channel_1:
        friendly_name: 'Grid Red Phase Power'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][1].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_2:
        friendly_name: 'Grid White Phase Power'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][2].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_3:
        friendly_name: 'Grid Blue Phase Power'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][3].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_4:
        friendly_name: 'Light Circuits Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][4].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_5:
        friendly_name: 'Power Circuit 1 Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][5].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_6:
        friendly_name: 'Power Circuit 2 Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][6].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_7:
        friendly_name: 'Power Circuit 3 Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][7].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_8:
        friendly_name: 'Power Circuit 4 Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][8].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_9:
        friendly_name: 'Oven Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][9].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_10:
        friendly_name: 'Air Con Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][10].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_11:
        friendly_name: 'Shed Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][11].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_12:
        friendly_name: 'Bore Red Phase Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][12].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_13:
        friendly_name: 'Bore White Phase Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][13].Watts }}'

      iotawatt_channel_14:
        friendly_name: 'Bore Blue Phase Power Consumption'
        unit_of_measurement: 'W'
        value_template: '{{ states.sensor.iotawatt.attributes["inputs"][14].Watts }}'

It might be worth just using this instead.

[Eoin]

Its also worth making sure the HA network can connect to the IoTaWatt through a browser, if you go to 192.168.0.74 while on the 192.168.0.x network what do you get?

[wattmatters]

I get the normal status page, can view all the graphs, change the settings etc.

Same as if I uses iotawatt.local.

[wattmatters]

@sparkydave

I just had a quick look and the custom integration kinda seems abandoned. Before swapping to the core integration I was using rest sensors instead and that worked really well, I’ve even been thinking of going back to them as they seemed to respond quicker to changes in the sensor values.

Here was my old code in a package file.

iotawatt.yaml

It might be worth just using this instead.

Thanks. Someone else suggested REST API to me yesterday, I looked and it didn’t make much sense to me but this looks similar. They pointed me to this post:

Interfacing with Home Assistant

Just so I understand how this work, this yaml goes inside the yaml.config file?

Are all the data channels accessible? e.g. energy accumulation, voltages, power factors etc?

Presumably if I change the IotaWatt settings, e.g. a swap some CTs around to measure something else and rename it, then I need to change the yaml code, is that right?

Maybe I try to get one data channel working and go from there.