I’m wanting to track the load energy usage in Home Assistant using the Energy dashboard, but the Energy sensor doesn’t record the flow of power to the load at all. The Power sensor does this.
In the off state, it monitors 0.2W of energy (Hue bulb, so there’s still idle power). In the on-state for the default warm white setting, it monitors 7.7W.
The Energy monitor does not update at all. It constantly reads 0kWh so I’m unable to properly track this entity in the energy dashboard. Am I missing a configuration somewhere, or is this intended behaviour and I’m interpreting it wrong?
Do you understand that:
“power” is instantaneous (how many watts are being consumed right now) and
“energy” is accumulative (how many watts have been consumed over time)
power is measured in watts
energy is measured in kilo-watt-hours
That means you need to consume over 1,000 watts of power for an hour or more just to get a value of 1kWh. But it doesn’t have to be a continuous hour. if you consume 100 watts 1 hour per day you will get to 1kWh after 10 days
see if you can change the unit to watt-hours rather than kilo-watt-hours. Then, for example if you have your 7.7W lights on for an hour you’d reach 7.7Wh.
I understand this, yes; but, how do I get Home Assistant to report on the energy usage like it does for my other appliances?
For example, my baseboard heaters are connected to a Sinopé thermostat. As soon as the heaters turn on, Home Assistant is able to pull the active energy usage from the thermostats and record these in the energy dashboard.
If the energy entity is always 0 (it doesn’t appear to be a cumulative counter like you’re suggesting) instead of representing the active power usage, HA will never report the energy usage.
0.2W of power, not energy. How long has the light actually been turned on? At 7.7W of power, it has to be on for almost 90 minutes to use even 0.01kWh of energy. Heaters use a lot more power than an LED light bulb; you’re not going to see the energy counter of a light bulb tick up second by second.
The energy counter in HA works for me: after about 6 months of usage, one of my light fixtures is showing 23.45 kWh. One that doesn’t get turned on much is at 2.37.
Huh, maybe that’s the issue. I’ve only had the switch for one month, and it’s controlling a single LED that’s only ever on for maybe an hour a day, but likely less. I guess i severely overestimated how much energy LEDs use, which is a good thing all things considered.