My issue is that Energy dashboard assumes the only energy that can be consumed is electricity, water or gas.
In the water meter page we can see the motivation for adding water to the dashboard:
“Although water usage is not strictly “energy”, it is still a valuable resource to track and monitor as it is often tightly coupled with energy usage (like gas). Additionally, it can help you reduce your ecological footprint by using less water.”
Is it possible to customize the energy dashboard, in a way that “gas section” becomes “other energy sources” (as other than electricity), and users can select if they use and pay for Gas, District Heating, Pellets, Coal, Oil or other valuable resource ?
I say “selector” because homes usually use only one of these: Gas, District Heating (water or steam), Pellets, Coal, Oil. (Some homes may use solar for heating water and air, but they don’t track energy and they don’t pay for it.)
Compared to Electricity, these energy sources are consumables only. They cannot be generated like solar and wind electricity. Pellets, Coal, Oil use storage though, like a battery. But that’s not an important metric if we cannot track the consumption.
The gas section at the moment tracks either Volume or Energy. The other sources use different cost metrics:
District Heating - energy
Pellets - weight (rarely volume)
Coal - weight
Oil - volume
Maybe this is regional thing, but in my town we use energy from district heating. CHPs provide very hot water to buildings. This heat is transferred with a heat exchanger to DHW and heating. We usually pay per kWh. Energy transferred is measured by devices called heating meters.
In some cases this energy is measured for the entire building with a single heating meter. The energy cost is then proportionally split to apartmens using data from water meters on the DHW and heat cost allocators. These heat cost allocators are usually set 1 point to equal 1 kWh, though in many cases it is different. A company like Techem recalculates the value each year for the specific building. DHW cost is calculated based on specific energy required to heat up 1 cubic meter of water from 10C to 60C. That is ~58kWh. Tracking these “allocator” devices will not provide accurate data, but it will be close to the bill in the mail.
I can track the energy consumed from district heating as gas. Which is fine as people who use gas boilers, don’t use district heating. Though I am bothered from the fact that it says gas.
Another very popular way of heating in houses outside of the city is wood pellets. This is measured in kg/h.
But how can I track pellets consumption from my pellet burner on the dashboard? The smart burner computes the amount and tracks the consumption hourly. But I cannot add it to the dashboard and set the price per kg. The only option I have is to compute the volume of 1 kg pellets and add it as GAS again. Which is fine I guess for the same reason that if you use pellets burner don’t use gas at the same time. But again I cannot change GAS to Pellets.