I’ve been through a bunch of topics and posts (and tests) but I have not seen someone attempt something close enough that I can copy it close enough.
When my dryer switches from idle to drying state, I want to start a “timer” of time elapsed to display in minutes:seconds on my entity card for the timer. I can’t count down because different cycles have different times and its simpler to give the user/me the elapsed time. Bonus would be the ability to resume the timer if the state change is close enough (so if you pause it for 30 seconds to take a single article of clothing out - but start back at zero the next time a load is started.
I’ve tried history_stats and I got this working but it doesn’t reset to zero its cumulative (which I understand is the point of that function) and I have to adjust the templating to really get it to display in mintues:seconds. Next I tried timer.start function but it also counted down, so i found someone counting up with a step calculation separate automation but It wasn’t clear to me how to translate it. Thanks for any guidance.
You could record the time (as a timestamp) when it gets to drying, and then create a template sensor that calculates ‘(as_timestamp(now()) - as_timestamp(recorded_time|int))| timestamp_custom("%H:%M")’
That would show time since the drying started.
How you record is could vary, but I’ve just published it to an MQTT topic, and then subscribed a sensor to that topic to read the value back.
I cheated for my washing machine timer and just used a standard counter.
An automation increments the counter every minute while the washing machine is running.
Another automation resets the counter when a new washing cycle starts
I wanted to have some indication how long ago the last sensor’s reading arrived and ended up with a template sensor that I update every 5 seconds via trigger: time_pattern because you cannot use timer.remaining for that.
Would love to see a better solution.
I think just minutes would be fine could you post an example of how you did that? I thought a minutes:seconds would look more professional, but technically it’s only counting minutes to give a general idea to the person who started the laundry if it might be done soon.
It would be helpful to know how to get/show seconds, but this process is typically 44 min (and not always known if its 34 - 50 min) (some cycles are auto-dry and you don’t have an exact idea) so a margin of error of 60 seconds will not matter.
I suspect if I got good enough with templating I could count the time in seconds and then convert it to minutes:seconds but maybe this wouldn’t be worth the “noise”
it’s not about counting but about how often your counter increments.
if you increment it every second like
trigger:
- seconds: /1
platform: time_pattern
you’ll have seconds in your counter.
then you will probably need a template sensor that displays it in minutes:seconds and that’s exactly where you’ll need your tempting skills - have a look here and here.
Thanks. The above items have worked perfectly, but I realize now I do need minutes:seconds because otherwise the UI is terribly confusing as the user doesn’t really know its counting “up”
I’d be interested to know if and how you finally got this working. Any updates you are willing to share? What does using a counter look like in the UI?
Bit late to the thread, but I recently drafted up something like this to monitor the runtime of a dryer.
I have a binary_sensor that tells me if my dryer is running or not (power monitoring zigbee switch).
I used this automation to count the minutes the dryer is on (ie binary_sensor is true):
- alias: Dryer Time Count
initial_state: on
trigger:
platform: time_pattern # every 1 minute
minutes: '/1'
condition:
condition: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.dryer_active
state: 'on'
action:
- service: counter.increment # increment the counter by 1
entity_id: counter.dryer_duration
Then I make a template sensor to convert the minutes to something more presentable in the UI:
dryer_running_time:
value_template: >
{% set ct = states('counter.dryer_duration') | int %}
{% if ct == 0 %}
Not running
{% elif ct > 60 %}
{{ ct // 60 }} hr and {{ '{:0>2d}'.format(ct%60) }} minutes
{% else %}
{{ ct }} minutes
{% endif %}
You will need another automation that calls counter.reset at some point, at the end of a cycle or when a new one starts.
Finally, in the UI, I display this (and other information) using custom:secondaryinfo-entity-row (which I use quite a lot to more efficiently display a lot of information):
