I don’t have a battery, but I do have an immersion heater in my hot water tank.
I’ve ‘made’ the system work, but adding a Shelly EM to my immersion heater controller, and then adding an empty template sensor for the ‘energy returned’ property.
My requests are;
Luke
That’s not really energy storage though is it?
How do you recover the energy from your hot water tank?
You don’t. it’s just another load like a space heater.
It is energy storage - it diverts power from being returned to the grid and is a useful store of energy (as hot water), for use at a later time.
A space heater is similar but not the same - you don’t have a choice as to when you use the energy stored.
Energy isn’t recovered as electricity, that’s why a ‘returned’ parameter doesn’t make sense, but is used in other ways - as hot water.
Use of the diverter and heating water directly results in lower consumption of oil, just the same as a battery results in lower consumption of grid electricity, etc.
Nope. For it to be considered energy storage you have to be able to recover energy from it.
By your reasoning my hot water cylinder is energy storage as I might not use the hot water for a shower for 8-12 hours after it heats up.
The hot water storage is nothing more than a load.
We’ll have to agree to disagree.
I care about how much energy I store use as hot water, compared to how much I return to the grid.
I’ve created a dummy sensor to keep the energy dashboard happy and it’s working fine.
Even though I agree with you, there ARE energy storage solutions which allow energy to be outputted.
Even if not mainstream it’s possible to create a battery like storage with compressed air. Also hydrogen is also possible.
They are not hugely used, but I agree with Luke that it could be practical to be able to change the type of storage.
Pumped hydro would also be a viable (ish) option.
All of those are energy storage systems as energy can be recovered from them. Your water heater still is not.
I agree that it’s not energy storage per se, but for those of us with PV systems and without batteries it’s a positive thing.
I would also like to have an option to add a visualization of how much energy was diverted into hot water.
Maybe add another option beside the battery ??
FWIW, Enova SF, the Norwegian state enterprise for “[promoting] a shift towards more environmentally friendly energy consumption and production”, considers it as (thermal) energy storage, and will even provide a government grant for installing it.
That’s good enough for me to semantically label it as energy storage.
Nice to see that there are some other opinions that are more balanced.
I think, the major issue here are the terms “energy”
I agree: Converting Electric energy - and heating water is in some kind a form of “energy storage” - as long, as you don’t use the water itself.
It is storing energy in form of “heat” - the heater itself would be a consumer, because it consumes electric energy and generates heating energy from it.
The water itself would act as the storage, but you can’t convert water into kWh…
so all forms, where >electric< energy will be converted into another form of energy are difficult to integrate into the energy dashboard, as long as the dashboard does not support additional forms of energy.
And I agree in general, that this should be considered for future development, to allow not only electricity and gas, but also Oil, hydrogen, water, and so on… it would be great, if the energy dashboard could be enabled into a complete “energy management” 
Then, we could overcome such discussions, I guess
I store heat energy in water, contained in two tanks. The water is heated by a wood burner.
Would it be possible (if I knew how many kWh’s worth of energy that the wood burner “produced” and stored in the tanks when it has burned out) to create a dummy sensor and add this to the energy dashboard?
Ideally, the sensor should not impact the total of the kWh worth of electric energy consumed through the grid.
Schematic over the system (temperatures update every 30sec):
You could use Gas to visualise it as I do.
It will still call gas but u know it’s burned wood…
Thanks! 
What does your setup look like?
I have 3 heat sources. Heat Pump, a water-bearing fireplace and my old Oil heating as backup.
I visualise the produced heat of all of them as Gas/kWh as workaround. But I would prefert to have different heat sources
