Statistics Sensor unique_id not seeming to register?

Configuration
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1

First off, I’m new here, and to the Home Assistant world.

Now my question - does the statistics platform read and recognize the unique_id paremeter? Docs suggest that it does, but I don’t think it works.

Here’s my context and configuration: I’m working on (yet another) implementation of tracking kWh consumed per cooling degrees, taking deep inspiration from others that have posted in the forums on this topic.

So, I’m trying to set up a template sensor to track the following:

kWh Cooling per Cooling Degrees Daily = [ 24 hour running average outdoor temperature ] / [ 24 hr running total HVAC power consumption ].

In my sensors.yaml file, which is included into configuration.yaml, I have the following relevant snippets:

# Keep track of the running 24 hours temperature
- platform: statistics
  state_characteristic: average_linear
  entity_id: sensor.openweathermap_forecast_temperature
  name: Average Daily Temperature
  unique_id: average_daily_temperature       # (Does this even do anything?)
  max_age:
    hours: 24

# Use 24 hours averaged hvac power to calculate a running 24 hours total
# Note, sensor.hvac_1min is another template sensor that sums 1 min power data from 4 different sensors, 2 x AC units and 2 x air handlers.  The sensors all come from an Emporium Vue 2 that I've connected via the cloud integration.
- platform: statistics
  state_characteristic: average_linear
  entity_id: sensor.hvac_1min
  name: Average Daily HVAC
  unique_id: average_daily_hvac  # (Does this even do anything?)
  max_age:
    hours: 24
  sampling_size: 1440

The above two sensors are then used to calculate the energy efficiency metric I hope to track:

Snippet from configuration.yaml:

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: "Cooling Degree Day"
        unique_id: cooling_degree_day_daily
        state: >
          {% set dd = states('sensor.average_daily_temperature_2') | float - 65.0 | float %}
          {% if dd > 0 %}
            {{ dd }}
          {% else %}
            {{ 0 }}
          {% endif %}
        unit_of_measurement: °F

      - name: kWh per Cooling Degree 24hrs
        unique_id: cooling_degree_day_24hrs
        state: >
          {% set hvac_usage = states('sensor.average_daily_hvac') | float %}
          {% set dd = states('sensor.cooling_degree_day_daily') | float %}
          {% if dd > 0 %}
            {{ hvac_usage / dd }}
          {% else %}
            {{ 0 }}
          {% endif %}

So I’ve noticed that first of all, the sensor created by the statistics have a different id, and appear to be named by HA derived from its name: parameter.

Initially things worked fine, but after a few restarts for (and for no apparent reason?) the sensor.average_daily_temperature sensor started showing up in HA as sensor.average_daily_temperature_2, even though I did not update the unique_id parameter.

In fact, I then noticed that changes I make to the unique_id parameter in the statistics platform have no effect on the sensor id in HA, and that Home Assistant appears to just assign the sensor a name?

Am I missing something?

2

This might be a broader issue, but definitely appears to be my lack of experience / something I’m not configuring properly.

After a few days of the above set-up running, it stopped working, with some of the calculated sensors going to “Unavailable”.

When troubleshooting it appears that the sensors were renamed in HA, and they now have a “_2” or “_3” appended to the name, breaking the configuration of my calculations.

I may post this in a separate question later if no one can help here, but any pointers to documentation / help would be much appreciated.

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