I have started to make heavy use of the energy dashboard now that we have such increasing energy bills. I took note of some pain points for me in terms of the settings page to add entities to the energy dashboard, and also the energy dashboard itself. My request is basically that the energy dashboard and settings page to add entities to it, be given a thorough overhaul as I think it has a huge potential. Here are some very basic ideas that I had in mind but I’m sure some experience developers / experts would have much better ideas.
Adding entities to the energy dashboard
When adding items to the ‘Electricity grid’ I wanted to add about 120 items (from about 50 lights to various other items created by the powercalc integration). It took a long time If it was possible to somehow add many items in one swoop, like some sort of ‘select all’, checkboxes on the ‘Add Consumption’ popup, using the same energy tracking entity, this could save a lot of time for users.
I actually want to show all energy entities on the electricity grid, even if I add more lights/energy entities over time. For me at least, I would really benefit from some sort of optional checkbox that allowed ‘Automatically add new energy entities’.
I guess the same improvements above could apply to all popups from the config/energy page, to add for example ‘Individual Devices’ where for me anyways, the same points would apply.
Energy dashboard itself
Ability to sort all tables by for example Energy/Cost and even Source. I would like to see what items have the highest energy usage/cost by sorting them. When theres > 100 items, its hard to see at a glance whats using the most amount of power.
When hovering on the ‘Energy usage’ bar chart, the popup for each bar doesn’t sort in any meaningful way. Ideally it would also sort the items from highest usage at the top, to lowest at the bottom.
The colors shown on the ‘Energy usage’ and ‘Sources’, for me anyways, range from a deep blue to a white. With > 100 entities, the various grades of blue become not so useful. I wonder would some change to the logic here to use a more diverse set of colors help. Eg if the top 5 or 10 energy consumers at least, be a very differing set of colors, blue,red,green,orange etc. They would then easily stand out. The remaining 90+ in my case wouldn’t matter so much, once those top few consumers stood out.
Default the sorting of the tables to something, currently I guess the default sort is by the internal entity list/the order the entities were added by the user to the energy dashboard.
Summary
I am sure any usability / UI experts would have much better ideas than me here so take what I say with a pinch of salt. I guess in summary, my request is that the entire Energy dashboard and the settings page for it, be analyzed to see what can be done for users that might have many tens or hundreds of energy entities to manage and visualize.
Thanks but no, all of them are under the consumption section, 0 are as sources / return to grid in my settings hence why they show on the dashboard under the ‘Energy Usage’ graph. Another reason the dashboard needs a huge audit / overhaul. All of my entities added under grid ‘consumption’ show on the dashboard as ‘sources’. Definitely a mess.
The idea behind the Grid setting is that you have one or two devices to monitor the whole house usage. This is normally via a device like the Shelly EM on the main meter tails into the house. Adding many Individual devices is not the way this function was designed. The monitoring of Individual devices is already sorted from most to least usage so I’m unsure what you need with sorting.
This is my setup with a Shelly EM on the meter tails and into a Utility Meter to split Peak and Off Peak tariff for costing
Thanks guys,
I guess maybe thats something that isn’t clear from the settings page or the docs here which states smart plugs can be added to the consumption section, which I have many many of. Energy Management in Home Assistant - Home Assistant
Maybe thats a feature request, for anyone who has a smart plug or ability to read the consumption of nearly all devices fairly accurately, that the dashboard be able to visualize that. Yes currently it assumes you only have 1 or 2 consumption devices. What you don’t see however if you leave those consumption devices out of the consumption section are things like the total kwh of all devices combined, the ability to see the cost of each device. The ability to sort those devices by cost I think is still a valid feature. Maybe its a feature request, for users that don’t have a single consumption device, to have a source group feature to group many (all, maybe automatically) to one new source entity that could be shown.
On your dashboard how for example can you see how much each device is costing per day/month and sort them by cost. the only way I can see is by adding ‘all’ consumption devices, all smart plugs etc. I don’t see it mentioned in the docs to not add too many smart plugs as it will blow up the dashboard. I just think different users like me will have different requirements on the tool, as I don’t have 1 single consumption device or one smart plug as the docs must be hinting at (without saying it), yet I and probably others might have many. I guess the request is that us in this situation still can see things like the total kwh of all devices, the cost per consumption device, ability to sort by cost etc. I don’t see how its a very unreasonable request. Its not how you use your dashboard yes, but its a genuine request, albeit its different to how you use the dashboard. Perhaps the feature request might be to update the ‘Monitor individual devices’ view to show cost per device, per time period OR to update the ‘Sources’ and ‘Energy Usage’ views to no longer assume theres 1 or 2 consumption devices, but to cater for cases like mine where I do have the ability to measure pretty much all devices in the household, explicitly without that 1 macro level source entity.
I like the idea of an energy dashboard but also have noticed that everyone has his own idea about it. So flexibility is needed.
Where almost everything in HA is very much open source this energy board is not.
I suggest that a set of love-lace cards are made available with which you can build your own dashboard versus your own likings, insights, devices and entities. They made the first step already with the energy flow card. So why not the rest as well. In fact the are so close that the separate elements are more or less there.
If it was possible to somehow add many items in one swoop, like some sort of ‘select all’, checkboxes on the ‘Add Consumption’ popup, using the same energy tracking entity, this could save a lot of time for users.
