Energy Monitoring Options within HA

There are few devices out there that do home energy/water consumption monitoring (e.g. Flume & Sense) and both already have APIs that integrate with Home Assistant. Some common questions that come up in other forums is the ability to monitor energy usage. There are two ways to do that:

  1. Variable Load Devices (fridge/dishwasher/oven/…) - One here needs a true measurement of the actual current draw, since those devices have multiple components and do not always run at the max/published power. There are already devices that do that, such as Sense and TP-Link KP115.

  2. Fixed Load Devices (These are primarily light bulbs, on dimmers too) - No need to put a current sensor here as all that is needed is whether the bulb is On, its max power rating, and the % dimmer level. With these 3 numbers, one can ‘calculate’ the bulb’s power consumption.

The question then for the community is if such option (#2) is available within HA, and if one can run some ‘custom’ calculations to display total power usage, per specific component/device.

Thoughts/Comments ?