I like how the Energy Meter dashboard is able to take 'sum'-type energy statistics (water, gas, and electric) and flexibly display hourly, daily, weekly, and/or monthly trends.
I would like to do the same for my rain sensor statistic, so I can display hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly rainfall.
I know I can do this with the Utility Meter integration BUT that approach does so by creating extra (and indeed redundant) entities and associated statistics along with all the associated redundant data entries.
However, while there may be use cases where one needs to create and operate directly on new derived, time-based entities, that approach is hugely wasteful of storage space and also clutters the entity list if all one wants to do is to display time slices.
Why should I have to quintuple the amount of data storage and entities just because I want to display hourly, daily, weekly, monthly time slices - with each potential time slice increasing the complexity and data storage?
This Energy Meter-like approach would also even be helpful for individual power consumption meters if one wants to see just the hourly/daily/weekly/monthly power consumed by a single device or circuit -- rather seeing it as a stacked bar part of the total energy consumption.
If the Energy Meter can do all this and more for water, gas, and electric meters, then clearly the same approach could be adapted to any cumulative statistic. Indeed, it seems almost arbitrary to only allow this for a few defined energy statistics.
Any reason that the Energy Meter dashboard type is not extensible to any one or more individual statistics that could be displayed alone or grouped and aggregated as stacked bar components?
Indeed for display purposes, the Energy Meter like UI, is much more flexible than using Utility Meters as the time slices and ability to switch between them is built-in. If anything, I would think that Utility Meters should only be used for the special case where you absolutely need to create and store new, permanent, intermediate entities.
Thoughts?