I recently updated my HA system and was suprised about the great energy section update! Well done and I assume that it will work for most people.
I do have a few questions however, which might be related to the fact that I could not find a more indepth description of the whole setup, beyond the very basics in the HA description file.
I will post them as seperate questions, otherwise I think that the whole response becomes pretty messy as I suspect that people will react on that specific question
Question 1) The Total cost entity
Why do I need to choose between an entity that either keeps track of the total energy consuption or an entity that defines the current price? I basically want to keep track of both of them and hope that as soon as I define a current price entity that there is also an entity that keeps track of the total energy consumption costs.
When I look at the card there is a possibility to show the energy consumption per year and you can select the date. I assume that you can go back as many years as you want, so I don’t see the need for defining a energy consumption entity?
As you can hear I am basically missing out on the whole logic behind it. Can I read more about it somewhere?
You don’t. You may have misunderstood something here.
You specify an energy consumption entity so that the energy dashboard can keep track of your energy.
You have the option to specify an entity that contains the cost/kWh, total cost, or not to track costs. The energy dashboard will calculate the cost of your energy consumed if you choose the entity that contains the cost/kWh option.
Thnx, Is the logic behind it that some people have an energy contract with fixed costs per month or something like that? because I have not seen that anywhere so far, but that might just be a lack of knowledge from my side.
I’m charged a different rate for peak and off peak use. So I have a peak and off peak energy sensor and two different fixed costs per kWh.
However I have chosen to put these fixed costs in input numbers and to select the third option (use an entity with current price) to make them easy to change from the frontend, if/when they do change in future.
maybe this topic is a bit old. Hope you can still awnser.
But I still have a question regarding changing prices from my energy provider. When I changed my cost (€/kWh) in July I had the impression the total cost in my dashboard changed as well.
Is this correct?
Related to this, is there entity or sensor that is exposing the combined total consumption of different grid sources? Basically the energy dashboard cards has this information available, but I can’t seem to find it from HA entities. Is it hardcoded, undocumented entity or just not available as of now?
