Utility Meter - take manual readings

Feature Requests
1

For those of us, that are not fortunate enough to have a smart meter, or who’s meter is out of wifi range it would be great to be able to manually enter manual meter readings in regular intervalls, to participate in the great new energy features introduced in HA 2021.08.

The difference between two readings could be distributed evenly to the timeslots between the readings.

I know this is not ideal, as it would not show the daily distribution (unless you take hourly readings :thinking:) but it would allow us unfortunate to join into the fun.

2

Pretty sure you can do this now.

Enter your reading into an input_number.

Use the input number as the input to a utility meter.

Unless the utility meter requires an entity in the sensor domain. In which case, use a template sensor to read your input number and feed the utility meter with the template sensor.

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3

The energy meter does not take meter readings (total kWh since installation) and calculates the difference but adds every reading to the total.

Also I assume, it does not create statistics by distributing the difference evenly between two readings.

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4

Are you saying your energy meter does not display a running total?

That is exactly what the Utility Meter does.

So if you input your daily reading (running total) into the input_number the Utility Meter integration will determine how much extra energy has been consumed since the last reading.

All you have to do is make sure you enter the new reading within a short time (<60 sec) of taking it so that the time stamps don’t skew the statistics too much.

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5

Ich sorry my last post was worded confusing. I edited it, but you were too fast :grin:

I already have a template base sensor for the utility meter. When I set this base sensor to the new value (representing consumed energy since installation of the meter, I guess this is what you call the running total?) the utility meter adds this value to the previous value. I would have expected that the difference to the previous value would be calculated. But maybe this is a misconception.

So, what you are saying is, I can read my meter once a month and would get an energy-dashboard with everage hourly consumption?

6

This is what I would have expected too.

Say your meter reading was 20,000 last month. Then this month you enter 25,000 then I would expect the utility meter to show 5,000.

It will only add the value (20,000 + 25,000 = 45,000) if somehow the sensor / input number went to 0 before being set to 25,000.

Can you show your template sensor config?

7

Oh, this was exactly the problem! The intermediate reset, as a result of my playing around.

Now it does exactly as you said: it adds the difference between readings to the current value.
Great!

Now maybe you could give me another hint: as I mentioned, I plan to do readings in irregular intervalls, probably only monthly or weekly.

What period would I set for the energy meter. What would be the determining factor: the reading frequency or the reporting resolution?

8

The utility meter resets its count at the beginning of each cycle.

So if you were entering information weekly or monthly a daily cycle would be pointless. It would read zero most of the time (except for each day after you entered a reading).

I’d suggest using a yearly cycle.

9

ok, thanks.

what should I do with this FR? It is kind of obsolete :confused:

11

It’s closed :slight_smile: