Some years ago and at a different home I set up a pair of IotaWatt’s and uploaded (with a push) from there to influxdb, and then accessed it from Grafana to display interesting stuff.
Time passed, I sold that house, and didn’t have time to redo it. In the meantime Home Assistant did a lot of work on an energy dashboard and energy related integrations.
It appears that HA stores data not in InfluxDB but in the default database as sensors (with the usual fade to less detail of statistics). There is an integration which can pull data from Iotawatt (though with some limitations).
Is there a consensus as to whether this is a better alternative? I had really good luck with the reliability of the push from Iotawatt, including over periods when HA or Wifi was down. But it is all home grown, and I appear to have misplaced all my prior work, so need to redo the aggregation/integration queries, retention periods, etc. But Influxdb seems a better database for this sort of data, and there appear there may be some issues of robustness in restarts, etc. for the pull integration.
Can someone share insight why Influxdb wasn’t used for the Energy work?
I’m also not wild at losing frequent data after 7 days (I think that’s how statistics work, right?).
But I’m also not wild about reinventing a lot of code (I wish I had thought of this before cleaning house in HA for the new house).
I realize this is a vague question but am curious if people have gone down this thought-path and where they landed?
Good questions! I run HAOS on a HA Yellow with a 1TB NVME SSD. I have two IoTaWatt home energy monitoring systems, one for my Main Panel and one for my Sub Panel. I have chosen to allow HAOS to host both InfluxDB and Grafana as HA Add-Ons. I then configured both IoTaWatts to push data to InfluxDB. I had this up and running for quite some time, and I have never bothered to try using the HA built-in Energy Monitoring/Dashboard. If I had solar panels, I think it might be more interesting. But for simple consumption monitoring, I am pleased with simply using Grafana charts. I really like the IoTaWatt’s built-in store-and-forward for pushing data to InfluxDB. I can take down my HA Yellow whenever I want, without having to worry about losing any energy data.
My purpose in a separate thread is specifically to pursue whether Influxdb is not a better choice, or have all the kinks (some mentioned in the above) been worked out? There were also one or more forks I guess due to limitations in the official? Didn’t try to follow the whys so much.