Individual Devices, sub devices

[andypnz (Andrew Palmer)]

Hi. On the energy dashboard is it possible to have sub devices?

For example, I have a sensor for hot water cylinder heating kWh. But I also have sensors for individual cylinders.

I would like bar graphs in ‘individual devices’ for both total HWC heating, as well as the individual devices. But obviously I don’t want the consumption counted twice (ie confusing ‘untracked consumption’).

Basically, I want to display energy consumption for a device but exclude it from tracked consumption. Is that possible?

[nicosemp]

Did you ever solve this? If yes, could you post links or a summary please?

I also have a smart power strip with individual switches and power metering. I’m looking to add a Shelly PM Mini Gen3 (no relay) in the wall plug to measure the consumption of my whole desk setup, including the power strip. I don’t want the power strip consumption to be counted twice in the energy dashboard.

[karwosts]

There’s no good way to do this. There is a feature request outstanding you can follow.

Energy - Enable Nested Devices

I have been considering a simple suggestion that might be workable: Add a new YAML dictionary attribute to the Utility Meter helper defining a list of “downstream” entities. The state value of the utility meter is unaffected and downstream entities may or may not sum up to that value (any remainder representing “other” in a Sankey chart). Is this over simplifying? Edited to add: thinking about this further, custom attributes can be added today… we could just invent a “standard” attribute which …

[nicosemp]

How about a custom sensor like this?

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: Wall plug untracked devices
        state: "{{ states('sensor.my_wall_plug') | float(0) - states('sensor.my_smart_strip') | float(0) }}"

This way I can just remove the wall plug (upstream) from the energy dashboard “Devices” and instead add both the power strip (downstream) and this “Wall plug untracked devices” sensor which represents all other devices connected to the wall plug.

[karwosts]

Don’t use float(0) or it will mess up the sensor anytime any sensor is unavailable.

You can use an availability_template instead to make your sensor unavailable if any of the sources are unavailable.

Additionally, neither of those sensors can ever reset, they must be lifetime totals that never decrease, or that will also screw up your template sensor.

There’s a lot of pitfalls when trying to combine sensors to make new statistics.

[nicosemp]

That’s interesting, thanks for pointing out the flaws!

availability_template is definitely useful to solve part of the issue, but I don’t know how to address the reset issue. I understand different plugs/bulbs have different power reporting like daily, weekly, monthly or total.
Is there no way to make this custom sensor compatible with those periodic reports?

My Tapo P304M power strip has 2 sensors for daily and monthly consumption, and I’m not sure how HA “knows” this for correct reporting beyond today and this month. I guess it’s part of the Tp-Link integration and it probably looks at the last value before it rolls back to 0 to find any day/month’s consumption.

On the other hand the Shelly PM Mini Gen3 should have a metering sensor that never resets, but I haven’t installed it in a wall socket yet.

My “Grid consumption” is a metering_total_absorbed sensor which also never resets. I can see the historical value and it’s always been increasing.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to do anything from this situation, but any help like which tools to search for would be very appreciated. Thanks!