Ignore sensor values outside of a certain acceptable range

Feature Requests
1

Occasionally I’ll get really off values from my sensors. My temperature sensor sometimes will report some value over 15,000 which is obviously incorrect. I have the same issue with an Aeonlabs Home Energy Monitor sometimes reporting negative values.

As far as I can tell, neither of these issues are home-assistant’s fault, but I’d like to see an attribute set using customize to limit the range of acceptable values(min/max) for a sensor.

2

For now you could use a template sensor to limit the output.

1 Like
3

I had the same problem literally yesterday. I wonder what would be a good place to add this. Cap all temperature values in a sensor to a certain range ? Or should it be per platform / device (lots of repetition when it gets to temperature?)

4

Originally I was thinking per device, but you have a good point that there’d be a lot of repetition. There could be a global max/min temp setting.

What about a min/max per unit of measurement? That’d also fix my other issue with a power sensor if I could set a min/max for w/kwh as well as F/C.

A more complicated solution could be a way to apply a template to all sensors (after their individual templates have been processed) so that someone could write their own logic to do something like this.

5

I have these problems also from time to to. I think there should be a min/max option for every sensor.
Also contributors should be encouraged to do some basic range checking where it is possible (e.g. % values are usually between 0 and 100). This will make the system much more robust.

6

I have this problem, too. I have five miflora sensors and all off them report poriodically values at about 5000°C.
I would really like to fix this.

7

Why not use the statistics sensor to do some averaging? Not ideal, but should smooth out incorrect readings…

8

Smoothing is not really an option here, because the strange readings are so far off.
Usual values are between 17°C and 22°C and then there is one with 4980°C.
I would really like to just ignore everything below -10°C and + 60°C

2 Likes
9

There is at least three components that can be used but don’t quite work together currently.

Individual exceptional measurements can be smoothed with statistics and a median of 5 readings would be OK to filter our suddent exceptional changes.

Persisting unlogical input as when my ESIC 433MHz shows temperature below -1000’C in certain conditions (humidity) is another issue. Condition like this could go on longer than reasonable sampling window for smoothing window, for example a couple of hours. Median and statistics then fail for this case.

There should be a way to convert the out of range values to missing or N/A. While value template can be used to change -1000 to 0, this is not OK for statistics.

Using value template to return None currently messes sensor history as HA treats the states discrete after seeing None values.

2 Likes
10

anyone a solution for this

11

I also tray to solve this problem, my pressure sensor sometime give wron value. So I need to filter the value.
I try this:

  • platform: template
    sensors:
    mb_template:
    friendly_name: Pressure Template
    value_template: >-
    {%- if states.sensor.pressione_barometrica.state < 900 > 1000-%}
    nan
    {%- else -%}
    states.sensor.pressione_barometrica.state
    {%- endif %}

In this way I want to filter only the values between 900 and 1000. But It doesn’t work…
Any idea?

2 Likes
12

@mr-varga - I stumbled onto this thread after my humidity sensor was reporting -999 Anyway I was monkeying around today and I believe you need to cast your state to a float. This works for me:

{%- if states.sensor.pws_relative_humidity.state|float >= 0 and states.sensor.pws_relative_humidity.state|float <= 100 -%}
{{(states.sensor.pws_relative_humidity.state)}}
{%- else -%}
nan
{%- endif -%}

Cheers!

5 Likes
13

Thanks danodemano :smiley:

14

where exactly would I set this? Directly on the value_template of the sensor? Or do I need an extra sensor to reprocess the original value?

15

@Benjamin_De_Smet - you create a new template sensor then use that sensor in place of the actual one.

16

Thanks =).

I ended up getting the same result like this:

  - platform: mqtt  
    state_topic: "mymqtt/sensornode1"  
    name: "SN1 Temperature"  
    unit_of_measurement: "°F"  
    value_template: >-
      {%- if value_json.temperature|float >= 40 and value_json.temperature|float <= 120 -%}
      {{ value_json.temperature | round(1) }}
      {%- else -%}
      nan
      {%- endif -%}
5 Likes
17

Filter sensor might be exactly what you need. Particulary outlier filter filters out any value outside a range.

4 Likes
18

its not exactly what you need, as you cannot define a range of permissable values in the outlier filter. Its close to the “range” filter, but range just floors and caps the values, not ignore them. :slight_smile:

19

This works! However… Isnt it problematic that it returns a nan value? Wouldnt it be better to just return the last “proper value”?

1 Like
20

Would a filter work?