Stuffing text value sensor entities to influxDB? Like furnance action?

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Hi Home Assistant folks,
I have a template sensor that I created in configuration.yaml - it is for a “hvac_action” attribute of a climate entity (for thermostat). It tracks if the thermostat is heating, cooling, or none.

With that sensor displayed in my lovelace, I see the text “cooling”, “heating”, or “none” depending on what the furnace is doing. Now I want to save the state of the furnace into the InfluxDB addon. I’m already grabbing the temperature attribute of that thermostat entity and it’s correctly save in Influx and charted in Grafana. But I don’t see any values in InfluxDB for the template sensor representing furnance state. I suspect that it might be because furnace state is not a number like temperature? Maybe it’s a text? I’m not sure how HA is translating the underlying value for climaite.hvac_action.

Under the influxdb platform in configuration.yaml, I simply added - sensor.hvac_pv_status (the template sensor name) in the list to include. Thinking that would take care of things. Does this need some kind of override? How do you send non-numeral data to influx in configuration.yaml

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Need same info…

Thanks!

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I have exactly same issue.
It would be great if someone can help us.
Thank you in advance for any hints!

4

This issue does not have a good article describing how to solve it.

You don’t need a template sensor. You can get the climate entity and its attribute in InfluxDB directly, and visualize it in Grafana without any intermediate sensors.

Since it was very hard to find the solution, I wrote an article on visualizing thermostat/HVAC in Home Assistant using Influxdb and Grafana.

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