Whether it is heating or cooling, energy can be one of the more significant portions of many people’s monthly costs.
So why don’t climate entities make it easier to track usage information that can make it easier to manage energy costs?
You shouldn’t have to have real time energy consumption monitoring to use the energy dashboard and measure your usage.
To be able to measure and understand your usage, It is useful to track run time by mode (heating/cooling/etc), number of on/off cycles, rate of change of current temperature, etc.
It is possible to do this with a bunch of template sensors, helpers, and some integrations that are getting a bit dated like history_stats and/or utility_meter. But it isn’t straightforward to do, and you have to figure out a bunch of it yourself.
Climate devices could make this much easier for users out of the box and in turn make it easier to manage costs.
Good idea. I think the true value of a smart thermostat is being able to track usage. Setting up templates and history_stats for this was the first thing I did when I installed HA. It would make sense to have that baked in, rather than require extra configuration to do something virtually everyone will want. Voted.
So add a couple of attributes to the climate device like “time heating today” and “time cooling today”?
That would be useful.
The issue with the temperature stats is that a lot of climate devices report system temperature instead of room temperature, despite actually switching state based on room temperature (looking at you Daikin API).
Yes, the you can start relating that data with other factors like energy use, rate of heat gain/loss, effect of outside temperature differential, wind, or, solar heat gain to better understand system performance.