Using A Helper As A Reimann Sum Input Fails Due To Wrong Domain?

[greengolftee87 (Russell D Valice)]

I have a device that is controlled by HA (On/Off) and I know how much power it uses. I would like to add it to the energy monitor and for that I was going to use a Riemann Sum with a helper as the input. When the device is on, the helper is set to the known watt draw and to 0 when off. However I cannot get the Reimann Sum to accept a helper as an input and get a unexpected domain error.

User input malformed: Entity input_number.HELPER_NAME belongs to domain input_number, expected [‘sensor’] for dictionary value @ data[‘source’]

Is there a better way to do this or a way to use an input_number as the input_sensor to the Reimann Sum? I am not trying to monitor the energy usage live as I already know the draw.

[tom_l]

Use a template sensor instead of the helper.

e.g.

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: My Device Power
        device_class: power
        state_class: measurement
        unit_of_measurement: W # or kW
        state: "{{ 42 if is_state('switch.my_switch','on') else 0 }}"

There’s also this that may be easier if you have a lot of these to do:

Powercalc - Virtual power sensors

In the last few weeks I have been working on a custom component to get virtual power sensors for your lights or other devices. It is stable enough right now to share it on this forum and make dedicated topic for it. The component provides multiple strategies to calculate estimated power consumption. One of the most interesting is the LUT method (using lookup tables). Some community members and me have taken measurements for all kind of different brightness/hue/saturation settings and their resp…

[greengolftee87 (Russell D Valice)]

Ah that’s a good workaround to change from a helper to a sensor, thanks! I don’t expect to have many so for now I’ll keep it simple but I like the idea of the virtual power sensor, especially with lookup tables for dynamic calculation.

[tom_l]

It’s not a “work-around” as such, it’s how to do it. The Riemann Sum integration only supports sensors as input, not number/inpiut_number helpers. You could open a feature request for this if you wish.

Note: For sharp transitions between power levels like this sensor will produce make sure to use method:left in your Riemann Sum config to minimise approximation errors.

[brooksben11 (Ben)]

+1 for Power calc. Couldn’t be easier to set things up to do what you want as it’s all through the GUI, and if you have any smart bulbs there’s a good chance it will automatically setup and calculate power draw for them as well. It did so for a number of mine, and the few it didn’t I ended up getting the data for and had added to the integration.