WTH Does the energy dashboard only allow m³ Gas for conventional heating?

Archive Month of "What the heck?!" 2022
1

Seems like a completely arbitrary limitation.
Quite a few people probably use liters of oil,
or in my case: liters of LPG.
Of course, one can just convert to m³ of LPG, but it is a lot less intuitive, since you usually pay by liter.

No idea what units other heat sources use (district heating, pellet, …)

EDIT: Just noticed that ft³ is now allowed, too. But not liters for LPG. Could that be added then?

2

I need Ccf as a unit for my gas meter. I also need “Daily customer charges”.

EDIT: I believe Ccf is the correct representation not CCF as I wrote earlier. That may be debatable.

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3

Agreed! I found out the energy dashboard will actually accept several units of measure beside m^3 for gas, but not if the device class is set to gas. I was able to track my gas usage by not setting the device class which causes an Unexpected device class warning. I have my units set to ft3 which HA deems acceptable and is easy enough to convert to CCF.

Please add CCF to acceptable gas units, and merge the apparent separate lists of acceptable units in energy dashboard for gas and the acceptable units for readings from a device of device_class: gas.

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4

This is what I had to do to get this working. I had to look a few things up and it still wasn’t easy. It doesn’t match how my gas company bills me but I can convert that in my head. Unfourtunatey this still won’t give me an accurate bill with daily customer charges.

  - sensor:
    - name: hvac gas cost volumetric charges per foot cubed
      device_class: 'monetary'
      unit_of_measurement: 'USD/ft³'
      state: >-
        {{ (states.sensor.hvac_gas_cost_volumetric_charges_per_ccf.state | float) /100 }}

  - sensor:
    - name: hvac gas foot cubed
      device_class: gas
      unit_of_measurement: 'ft³'
      state_class: 'total_increasing'
      state: >-
        {{ (states.input_number.hvac_gas_ccf.state | int) *100 }}
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5

@giqcass posted a great workaround, but adding more units seems like an easy improvement. I’d make a PR adding ccf myself, if I knew how to properly do so.

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6

I think that in a full implementation units such as USD/Day, USD/Month, and USD/Year make sense. Perhaps even USD/Hour or USD/Minute. There are obviously other ways this could be implemented by the HA team like something that simply took measurements in the Monetary domain and asked the user for the frequency.

I updated my system to compensate for that need by adding another “gas source” to simulate my daily customer charge. I wanted to distribute the charges across the day so it looks better. At the beginning of each hour it increments 1/24th of a day. It gives us the day of the year and hour of the day as a decimal number. January 1st 12am for instance is 0.041666666666666664. December 31st at 11pm would be 365.0 or 366.0 in a leap year.

  - sensor:
    - name: hvac gas today customer charge
      device_class: gas
      unit_of_measurement: 'ft³'
      state_class: 'total_increasing'
      state: >-
        {{ ((now().strftime('%j') | float) - 1) + ((now().strftime('%H') | float + 1) /24)  }}
7

Hi, wouldn’t it be even better to have all energy consumption in kWh, also e,g. for gas?
In my case I created a template sensor to convert measured gas volume into kWh. The energy dashboard does not accept kWh.
If that would be accepted then the electrical energy and the energy for heating coming from gas could be added up to give a total energy consumption.
With more hybrid systems (heat pumps combined with gas heaters for very low temp) that would make a lot of sense, I think.

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8

And even that is subject to the UOM debate. Some like Joules instead of kWh, or BTU, kcal or whatever. I prefer to be able to use the same unit as in my energy bill.

But your request makes sense; there are standards to convert for instance m3 into kWh depending on your supplier. it would be good to be able to compare the different energy streams at an apple to apple level .

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9

This! I just want to have the same unit as my energy bill.

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10

I completely agree with this. It is of course a bit strange not being able to add GJ service delivered to your home to the Energy Dashboard. Like gas, water and electricity, this is a form of a ‘utility supply’ that is delivered to soo many homes and where customers are billed in GJ, please include it in the Energy Dashboard.

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11

Definitely need L as well. I buy my oil in litres not m3.
I burn my oil at c.1/L per hour - so maybe 0.004m3 per day. I can see my electricity usage in kWh not TWh or GWh, so quite inconsistent to have to show my oil usage with this many zeros!

Also, can we have the ability to rename it from Gas to whatever fuel source - whether wood, wood pellets, gas, oil, biomass or {other random fuel sources}? (would love to measure the carbon footprint as well)

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12

I need litters as well, my daily comsumption is so low that the energy tab (animated pictures) shows 0m3 when I have comsumed 50L…

13

Yes, I need GJ, too, for the Energy Dashboard, because my suppier, which is not gas, but a “district heating” makes everything in GJ. And also the meter collects GJ.