"Help" value for rotating between flows

Third party integrations Node-RED
1

Hello,

I have created a automation for having excess solar energy put into a three phase heater in the warm water tank.
It is a three phase system so currently it is switching on one phase at a time but this results in that phase 1 resistor is getting the most hours on it.

So now to the problem I’m having. I would like to create a sensor entity or something which value would be set as the last resistor is turned of.

It would be something like
“help value” = 1 then the order would be L1 → L2 → L3 and when the excess energy decreases it would switch off L3 → L2 → L1 and then set “help value” = 2
“help value” = 2 then the order would be L2 → L3 → L1 and switching off L1 → L3 → L2 and the set “help value” = 3.
“help value” = 3 then the order would be L3 → L1 → L2 and switching off L2 → L1 → L3 and setting “help value” = 1

How could I create this kind of “help value”?

2

I used a state machine node to model this (there are probably better ways to do this but hey, I had some fun doing this).

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Or you could use a node-red context to keep track of your “helper value”

https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/context