Fake power consumption metering without energy sensor

ESPHome
1

So today i have installed a Shelly 1L and I have realized it does a “fake” power metering by entering the expected consumption and incrementing it over time when the relay is on. I think this could be replicated in ESPHome as well, where with simple relays/light switches I would input the approximate consumption based on the device specs. and it would calculate the total consumption for the energy dashboard.

Does anybody have a template that could be utilized for this purpose?

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There’s this custom integration if you want to do it in Home Assistant:

2 Likes
3

There is this custom components if you want to stick with esphome.

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refreshing my topic a bit, thanks to @tom_l 's suggestion i started to use PowerCalc which works great. Now I am thinking about achieving the opposite, e.g. based on an increase in overall consumption (measured at the utility meter by a Shelly 3EM and fed into Home Assistant) determine if a particular device is on and estimate its overall consumption.
For example:

  • I know my bathroom heater consumes 900 W on phase 3
  • So if a 900W increase on Phase 3 would be detected, a boolean entity would come on in HA and the overall consumption of the heater would be calculated and shown on the energy dashboard.
  • Also it would be nice to do it for the fridge.

Rob from the Hookup did something like that via Node-Red here Which Smart Energy Monitor Is Right For You? ShellyEM vs Sense - YouTube but the link to the script is very different to what is shown in the video

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I do some similar gymnastics to calculate per flows for devices.

For my l3 phase I have two small AC units, two large AC units and my laundry (washing machine, dryer and heat pump hot water service).

My SolarEdge monitoring tells me how much power is being consumed in phase l3. I have Shelly power monitoring in my two small AC units and smart plug power monitoring for my washing machine, dryer and hws. I also have a three phase EV chargepoint (shelly_channel_c) and three phase pool heatpump.


    hvac_power:
      unit_of_measurement: "W"
      unique_id: 170bff78-457d-4c70-8c91-b44334b75b40
      device_class: "power"
      value_template: 
        "{{max(0, states('sensor.modbus_phase_c_consumption')|int(0) 
        - states('sensor.shelly_channel_c_power')|int(0)
        - states('sensor.pool_heatpump_channel_c_power')|int(0)
        - states('sensor.dryer_power')|int(0) 
        - states('sensor.hws_power_2')|int(0)
        - states('sensor.washing_machine_current_consumption')|int(0)) }}"

Detecting device signatures aka sense would be a neat addition to Home Assistant, but I don’t know how to do it without some machine learning.