Template help for unavailable attributes

Configuration
1

I have been screwing around in the template dev tool for quite some time now. Can’t find a working solution.

I currently have a number of template sensors to pull wattage information from some switches.

https://github.com/SilvrrGIT/HomeAssistant/blob/master/sensors.yaml#L219

They work great normally. However at startup HA doesn’t have all the attributes yet (i.e. ‘current_power_w’ is not in the states tab) and they throw an error. Or if there isn’t a KWh reading yet it will show as unknown.

I would like for them to not throw an error when the attribute isn’t available and read 0 until another value is provided. Is this possible?

2

You can Add | default(0) to your template after attributes["current_power_w"]
Check my file for more details and a better solution
https://github.com/lolouk44/homeassistant/blob/master/sensors/Edimax.yaml

1 Like
3

Many thanks, that works perfectly.

1 Like
4

I know this has been solved, but did you try

edimax1_watts:
  value_template: "{{ state_attr('switch.edimax1' , 'current_power_w') }}"
  unit_of_measurement: 'W'

Which should return the value if present and none if it isn’t? Then you could use the same method as above to make it zero if needed, but it’s a shed load less code.

All of this is a random thought btw, might not even work.

5

I think I used that and it throws an error as ‘current_power_w’ isn’t defined sometimes. Its not a issue of an unknown value, the attribute actually doesn’t exist until you turn the switch on. That works fine for reading the value when the attribute is present.

6

According to the docs it should work in that format even when the attribute doesn’t exist, hence my question.