Hello everyone and a very big thanks to all of you who are making Home Assistant possible.
I was thinking that a very simple watt meter, is to implement somehow the wattage of a device on a switch or light and it would calculate the kWh (and possibly cost, with a bit more configuring) according to the time the switch/light was ON.
Maybe you could call it the Billo Watt Meter. (After all it does contain the implication of (your electricity…) Bill = 0
Forgive me if this was suggested already by someone else in the past.
There’s already support for devices to measure power usage.
I have z-wave sockets that show the current usage and past usage. This could be combined with a template sensor to calculate costs.
I think this is an interesting idea. It could be a component done in a way that would not require any additional hardware.
I think it would require an additional field for devices that gave a watt value and then a component value that gave a cost per watt. All entries in the yaml.
Once you have those values, you just look at the historical on/off that is already stored in the DB and do the math and display it as a sensor value I guess.
Thinking about this even more, it would be awesome to visualize the usage data in a format similar to the way the energy company presents it in the bills:
Then I could use HA to keep the energy company honest.
Not sure I get what you are asking for here…
Do you really run everything of HA?
I would image heaters, boilers, dishwasher etc is not connected to a switch controlled by HA.
Then how would HA be able to calculate your total household wattage so you can compare that with specification of electrical bill?
Some heaters and boiler ARE connected to simple switches , also some spotlights, fans etc . Its all about measuring a specific device consumption overtime WITHOUT any additional hardware . It sounded like a simple and useful idea in my head. I wish i had the skills to make that myself but you guessed it, i dont.
It seems like people do not need that so i ll stop talking about it.
Anyway thanks for listening and be yourselves.
In my opinion, this is just another way to use data is that is ALREADY being collected. HA is already collecting on/off times of devices. By giving the ability for a user to add a Kwh cost, a component can present a nice chart over time that shows energy usage. Pretty clear value in my mind for using the data that is already in the system.
It is funny… I was thinking about this last week. All of the data is there, it is really about allowing the user to specify the load on the per device/switch/light (6W LED, 60W incandescent, …), the duration that the device is on and the cost of the electricity. While it wont be 100% accurate, it is at least something to start with before investing in a home energy meter that monitors the main lines. Has anyone started working on this?
i am still interested in an watt meter for my bulps… i mean it is very easy i guess if someone meassures the watt in 1 by 1 steps … fill the values in a datasheet and we could build up another component like “virtual watt meter” cause philips hue lamps wont have any watt meters
I was just thinking about this if you can track the total load of the whole house when you individually turn off devices you can track their individual use and categorize it like that maybe some sort of sensor that can try and figure out the decrease or increase of that wattage
This would be interesting for my use case, not to track the whole house, but rather the opposite.
In our summer house we have an Owl energy meter, so I already have a nice overview of total energy use, but I would be interested in being able to calculate the energy use for just the pool systems (pool heater and circulation pump) as I already have access to runstates of both of these.
As they draw a significant amount of power, we have invested some energy into decreasing their energy draw. It takes a bit of effort to accurately keep track of their actual consumption.though as A/C, cookers and other things muddy the picture from the total consumption.
