WTH I can't manually track water/gas/electricity meters?

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

Automatic meters are incredible but not everyone has the ability to install them.
It would be great to have a convenient way to add meter readings precisely as I see them so that HA could automatically calculate the difference, plot a graph and store historic values.
That way, on top of smart plugs, flow meters etc., we could monitor the overall usage of water/gas/electricity.

2

You could create a Utility Meter helper, and then use the utility_meter.calibrate service to update it manually!
The whole process can be made quite smooth with for example a number input, and a button entity that calls a script which in turn grabs the value of the input and calibrates the helper meter with it.

3

I don’t have realtime monitoring of my consumption from the utility provider (the grid). The meter provided by the electric utility has Zigbee built in for this, but the utility doesn’t allow it to be enabled.

But I can periodically download CSV data at 15 minute resolution. It would be nice to be able to have a process to back fill the energy dashboard so I can collate it it with the devices I have realtime consumption monitoring for and my solar production.

4

I’d add some kind of text or numeric input helper. Then I would create a template sensor from that and use it as the input for the energy dashboard. It would look like you used all that power or gas all at once each time you entered it but I don’t see a way around that.

Currently I’m setting up estimated gas usage based on furnace run time.

5

That’s another WTH that’s been on my mind, WTH doesn’t the climate entity track statistics like run time, on/off cycles, duty cycle to help people manage/optimize their energy use.

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6

I got a WTH for you. Why can’t I use CCF as a measurement? Right now I have to convert it to ft^3

2 Likes
7

This is what I set up. After manual monitoring for a while I’m going to try estimating using furnace run time. I’ll use an automation to update the input helper then if the estimate is too far off I can manually update the input helper once a month to make corrections. I didn’t put in helper code because that should be done in the UI.

  - 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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