What is the utility meter reset cycle in Home Assistant, and what is it used for?
Why should I use short reset cycles, such as 1 hour or 15 minutes, if the data is still being stored in the system?
If the Energy dashboard already shows data for any time period, what is the benefit of organizing data through reset cycles? Is there any real difference in how the data is structured inside the system?
Is there any point in using reset cycles if I can manage without them, and what advantages do they offer compared to simply using the Energy dashboard?
The Utility Meter can be used for many other things besides tracking energy usage. It can track and the “reset” based on the reset cycle you define, to use in graphs etc.
Below uses a utility meter to track / count the number of flights going over my house and then using apex graph to visualise the data.
Yes the data is stored in the DB somewhere, much easier to use a sensor to do this, than extracting data from a DB.
It is true that the energy dashboard displays the energy consumption, but again if you want a custom dashboard, in this case using the Tariffs
As you can see here, I can use the split between Peak and Off Peak utilization to visualize within a other dashboard, that is not visible in the energy dashboard as far as I know.