I have a large house with a lot of “real” devices and sensors where I am starting get into more advanced scenarios such as a home alarm system and power/energy monitoring. This means that I need to create various templates and groups to do the various things I want to achieve, but I feel I’m getting tripped up on some of the fundamentals of HA. A primary example is with template sensors, or the group sensors from the inbuilt helpers.
When I create a template sensor with the input of one or more “real” sensors, or a group sensor of the exact same sensor type there are a few things that I observe:
- There is a significant delay before data appears for the newly created “fake” sensor even when there is valid historical data of the “real” input sensors.
- Why is this?
- Is there any way to avoid this, or at least reduce the time it takes to poll/collect the data from the input sensors?
- Is there some way or can I manually force the “fake” sensor to update itself from the input sensors?
- A sensor group (using the inbuilt helper) of two or more of the same types input sensors does not end up with the same properties as a single sensor.
- Example is on the Energy dashboard where I compare one room with an electrical heater which I can add as an “individual device” and it will display the energy consumption just fine. But if I have a room with 2 electrical heaters that combine to make it appear as a single device using the inbuilt helper group I get errors such as this:
- Is there some way to view the yaml of how HA represents a device or sensor to assist me in creating a “fake” template sensor (or other entity)?
- Example is on the Energy dashboard where I compare one room with an electrical heater which I can add as an “individual device” and it will display the energy consumption just fine. But if I have a room with 2 electrical heaters that combine to make it appear as a single device using the inbuilt helper group I get errors such as this:
- “Unknown” and “Unavailable” states make me want to cry.
- What is the difference between these states?
- I thought the new (in 2023.2) inbuilt helper groups were supposed to improve the behavior of a group where one or more of the sensors in the group was in one of these problematic states?
- Is there a reliable way to simply exclude the unknown/unavailable sensor from the group without making the group unknown/unavailable?
