Energy Monitoring with Home Assistant

[@davidunwin7868]

I love the energy dashboard. I set it up once I got solar installed 3 months ago, and used it to verify the stats in my energy bill just this week. Getting solar installed saved me AU$100 this quarter, and while my energy use from the grid has gone down, my actual energy usage has increased because I now run my appliances (dishwasher, washing machine) when the solar is producing enough power. Just remember all these extra devices running, including homeassistant is using energy, and that forms a phantom load that you have to pay for. Using the energy history information I can work out every time my gas heater blower turns on, when the fridge turns on, and what the base-load is. All this info comes from the Fronius integration for my inverter. Knowledge is power (and less energy).

[@tp-project]

I took your advice on moving to a NUC from a Raspberry Pi. Was expensive but I am much happier with the performance. A 10th gen I3 with 8gb has speeded up everything and now my lights and switches are working instantly with fewer quirks.

[@markpalmer9002]

3 minutes into the video (which is good so far) but I might find a new electrician. The wires into the Shelley device (IMHO) should not show bear stands, they should be pushed all the way in or better still have bootlace ferrules on them. Ok back to the video. Good video and one that will come back to. I'm using the home glow hardware but having trouble getting the information into the energy dashboard, so I'll watch again and try and work out what I'm going wrong.

[@B-a_s-H]

FYI: If that Shelly EM in that picture (@2:42) is yours then I'd really advice you to start using bootlace ferrules / end terminals on your stranded wires (or even better: use solid core wiring). Connections like these are suboptimal at best and possibly even unsafe.

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

Thanks for the feedback!

[@Gerrit-Max]

This is exactly what I've been wanting to set up so I can see our exact electricity use.

[@Gowah8]

About 1 year ago I installed a Shelly EM with 50 amp clamps. Recently I purchased a Hildebrand Glow HID which reads directly from the smart meter. Over a 24 hour period, depending on the total energy used during this period, the Shelly total can be up to 5% less than the total directly from the smart meter; less energy used less difference. Also I use the HACS Powercalc add-on for devices that are on all the time with constant energy draw, or for large current devices (e.g. immersion heater) where I can seperately monitor the on off switching via my Genius Hub smart heating setup.

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

Interesting results you're seeing, thanks for sharing!

[@JamieVids76]

How do you have these configured in the energy dashboard? I use the glow and the OVO integration but it adds them together

[@Gowah8]

@@JamieVids76 My provider is Octopus. In the Energy dashboard I use the Shelly for electricity and the Glow for gas. But neither gives the correct cost due to the current inability to include a daily standing charge. Consequently, I have developed my own dashboard which contains much more comprehensive info using the Glow input and from several smart plugs and a couple of Powercalc pseudo inputs.

[@ryansomerville5679]

@@Gowah8 Just wondering, if your glow is more accurate, why do you use shelly for electricity?

[@LeiChat]

Shelly suggest the EM is accurate to 1%. How does the Hildebrand Glow HID and Shelly EM compare to the smart meter billing?

[@EsotericArctos]

My electricity retailer charges the wholesale energy rate to consumers, so the price (in Australia) changes every 30 minutes, often cheaper durign the day when a lot of solar is present. They do have a Home Assistant integration, and made some basic automations to alert me if electricty costs is below or above a certain level so I can look at when to put the washing machine on or something similar. I know the washing machien doesn't use a huge amoutn of power, but if I am home and costs are cheap, better to run it on cheaper, cleaner power than in the evening a lot of energy in Australia is still supplied by coal and is more expensive. Little things do make a difference.

[@87vortex87]

Watts = amperage*voltage. Voltage is usually between 210 and 253 volts in the EU. More amperage means more watts. X amount of continued watts over a period of time is total usage, where we use kilowatt per hour as a standard, or kWh. And where kilo is 1000, so 1kwh is 1000watts for one hour continuously.

[@v.6ak]

It's not always that easy with AC, as you have apparent and real power. IIUC, amperage*voltage = apparent power, but some watt ratings (probably even the billing) use real power. That's probably also the reason why sometimes watt rating is considerably less than voltage*amperage.

[@1234andrew1234]

Thanks for the video! i noticed at the end it looks like you are using signal to send notifications. It would be super helpful if you could take a video tutorial, as there aren't any others on youtube 🙏🏻

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

Ooooft, one day I will tackle this. It's such a niche topic, and such a pain in the neck to set up, that it would make for boring viewing! I'll add it to my list to make a video for in 2023!

[@1234andrew1234]

@@HomeAutomationGuy Explains why there aren't any videos! 😅 Looking forward to the 2023 series in any even!

[@1234andrew1234]

@@HomeAutomationGuy That explains why there are no videos! 😅 Looking forward to the 2023 series in any event!

[@sundance2005]

Great video but would be nice if you gave a link to the device you used. I'm sure I will find it just makes things easier.

[@rob1971]

Great video Alan, thank you. I need to work on getting my Octopus data into HA in a meaningful way, so I'll be revisiting this when I have time 👍🏻

[@JamieVids76]

Look up their CAD, or the Hildebrand Glow 😊

[@goldraketub]

that was sharp !! very vell done sir thank you !! 🙂

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

You're very welcome

[@MImranIqbalofficial]

Informative videos 👍. I want to connect my Voltronics Inverter through Serial Interface to HA. Can you provide information regarding that? Thanks

[@ambostralian]

Is there a place that you post the Configs for your energy consumption sensors? I have mine set up with a few smart plugs but they only show the total over all time. I'd be interested to see the yaml for your one that shows today's consumption.

[@BadgerBob]

Does the Shelly measure ‘reverse’ current? I have solar, and return excess power to the grid at time. The issue I have with most meters/clamps is that they count the reverse, so I get a completely incorrect measurement (think I’m pulling from the grid, when I’m actually doing the opposite). How are people dealing with this? (My iBoost clamp recognises and measure what’s going back into the grid, so I know it can be done). Sorry for the silly question, I’ve not done any measurements this way I have just been watching the meter and using EM smart plugs.

[@seenoweevil1991]

The Octopus integration has sensors for current daily consumption in kWh and the cost so you don't need the Shelly clamp or HA doing any calculations on the current unit rate. Much simpler. * You may need the Octopus mini, which is free

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

The Octopus integration and Octopus mini are amazing! I use them both

[@seenoweevil1991]

@@HomeAutomationGuy Yeah, it's great. I've only really just got into Home Automation stuff. Like many people I had some basic kit, lights etc. and some simple setup on Google Home but got frustrated with how limited and unreliable it was (I don't think Google care about Home Automation whatsoever any more) and moved to a dedicated box with HA on it. Now I have automated climated, lights and a bunch of energy monitoring! I'm currently down the rabbit hole of wanting all my devices energy-plugged to fill in all that 'untracked consumption'. I picked up an Eve smart plug as it's seemingly the only Matter/Thread UK plug on the market with energy consumption. Not sure I can recommend it tbh. It's a nice device but it's quite bulky and can block adjacent sockets (why!??). At least the UK one does. Oh and it also cost £40. I'm hoping someone comes to market with a cheaper, slimmer alternative. Love the channel.

[@87vortex87]

If you want to know how much green energy comes out your electricity socket right now or any moment, use the Co2signal integration in home assistant

[@shawnbenn]

I love your channel. Great video. I have a question, are there any wired smart home products? I think that wired products are more secure. For example, Why there isn't wired smart bulb? The technology to have entranet over power has been here for many years. I'm looking for any wired smart home products.

[@JamieVids76]

I was going to go the shelly route but for the same price I found the Hildebrand Glow which works over mqtt and brings in unit costs and gas per half hour (I'm with OVO) by linking to my current smart meter via it's CAD, I believe octopus do their own version of this. My only problem at the moment is that I have had the OVO integration for ages now, and I want to keep it's history and run it in parallel to my new glow. Does anyone know if this is possible?

[@dwassortedmedia]

Thank you for posting this I was not aware these products from Shelly existed! If needed would a user be able to install these for a single device that has no input where say a smart plug could be implemented? I am mainly looking to have my hot water heater monitored

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

Yep, that's a perfect use case for them. I use them to monitor the amount of power my solar is generating, and how much my induction stovetop is using.

[@Dutch79]

You might also consider a smart thermostat (like a TADO).

[@meptalon]

Awesome video, but.... how can I apply any of that as a tenant in a residential building? Nothing close to my apartment, the meters are in the basement/parking lot, so out of reach of any wifi or Bluetooth system.

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

When I was a tenant I relied on smart power plugs that had energy monitoring to monitor individual devices, and finding an electricity provider that gave me usage data via an API. In the UK we have Octopus Energy that gives you access to the data in the way that can be imported into Home Assistant.

[@waperboy]

80 percent... try 300 percent. Although Home Assistant has enabled me to decrease everyday power usage, heating and power is still... 300 percent more expensive, +/- 100 percentage units depending on daily prices. And after migrating HA recording to MariaDB, the energy cost calculations in HA went haywire, and is now utterly useless. I can run a SQL script to recalculate costs, but that only fixes the past - current energy cost calculations continue to be messed up.

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

I'm sorry to hear that :(

[@SondelaConsulting]

Please can you link to the products below that you mention in your video. Also how do you get the Octopus Energy widgit installed ,

[@bartverwijst1]

I'm about to move into a new flat in the UK, we're doing renovations now so it's the perfect opportunity to get this stuff sorted. I wonder, when you are monitoring your full usage of your house and add smart switches, don't they add this all up? Or is this separate so you can see individual usage per plug? I'm planning to add a Shelly to every socket in the house so I can accurate measure all usage but also want the total usage of the full house via the main switchboard. I was wondering if you have an idea how to measure gas usage in the UK?

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

I don't have Shelly in every socket (And for my house I think that would be overkill, and probably would become annoying as one of them is bound to fail every now and then), so the EM lets me see the whole house usage including everything that is hardwired in (Towel rails, whatever). These "individual devices" are separate, and don't get added to the overall house usage section at the top.

[@bartverwijst1]

@@HomeAutomationGuy Thanks, that's exactly what I wanted to hear. We're only living in a 2 bed flat, so not a lot of sockets in total anyway. Might even use standard plugs. That's really helpful!

[@B-a_s-H]

What's the brand/model of your gasmeter?

[@BartekCelary]

Rounding should be done at the end of the calculation not before.

[@fsprtube]

Love the videos and the dashboard. I have an issue i cannot resolve yet. The dashboard time seems 1 hour off. The actual time is e.g. 12:41 and the data is shown to be 11-12 and should be 12-13. the source is an mqtt "timestamp local = 2023-05-30 12:41:51" so this seems to be good. My time setting in YAML is TZ = Europe/Amsterdam. Any idea where to search for a solution?

[@jardelainen8278]

energy monitoring is hot topic for us in the Europe now

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

Sure is!

[@roberthuntley1090]

I'm not convinced about the accuracy of these current clamp measuring systems. I used to use a similar Owl Intuition PV monitoring system, and over a few years was able to compare its measurements with the 'official' solar & import meters. The solar generated reading wasn't too bad (95% accurate) but the import figure was way too high and was only 75% accurate. Its estimate of Exported power was unusable (250% out). I'm not blaming Owl in particular, there are systematic errors inherent in these things. As an example, the current clamps were rated at 71 Amps which is a sensible maximum load, but most of the time a solar system is generating a few amps (typical cloudy weather), and keeping the imported current down to a similar level as well. Means that the clamps are typically operating in the the very inaccurate end of their operating range. For the Owl clamps the quoted accuracy was 5% above 3 Amps, but only 10% below that.

[@TheDropForged]

What was that redacted part? I would also like to receive notification on my phone.

[@MVE200]

How do you account for your daily standing charge for both electric and gas?

[@DominikZalewski85]

Great video. I'm going to get shelly :) I'm octopus go faster tariff, do you have to do anything extra or HA will fetch my current unit price automatically and adjust the cost accordingly ?

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

Once I added the Octopus integration it seems to have kept the tarif up to date on my behalf

[@swademcYT]

My favourite is when people express power (kW) as "kWh per hour" xD... They are technically not wrong haha!

[@DDC251992]

could you share the template code to monitor energy and watts per day that you explain at the end of the video'?

[@amoenus_dev]

What I really would like to know how to MANUALLY add meter readings, ideally also retrospectively. I have no way of installing anything of the monitoring devices (no access/rented place)

[@RaduUrsache]

get some power plugs that also monitor energy. put those at the core of all your devices. sum them up and you’ll have realtime monitoring + statistics. more expensive but no changes made to the house

[@techieboy333]

Is there a way to import historic consumption data? I've got smart meters installed for gas and electricity and there's a third party web service that allows you to download historic data for a given period in whatever frequency (30 minute readings) your smart meter is set to report back to the DCC. Would be good to be able to get this into the Energy dashboard somehow to give some meaningful history.

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

I don't know the anwer to this I'm afraid.

[@petergdk]

Sorry to ask, but how are you measuring your whole house with a Shelly EM? I thought all european counties had 3-phase power running into the house? Can the Shelly EM measure all three phases at once?

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

I only have one phase in mine

[@MyHeap]

Would you consider showing Rhasspy with HA in docker?

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

That is something I am going to look at in the new year! 2023 is the "year of the voice" for Home Assistant, so I'll definitely be looking into this

[@MyHeap]

@@HomeAutomationGuy That's awesome. I have Rhasspy set up on my home assistant docker stack as a base and another instance as a satellite on another computer. Still trying to make everything work. ( I have shared MQTT server and some command working, but I have something mis-configured because it will repeat the commands a few times.) When you start covering it, I hope you do a video or two on the Intent scripts and an explanation on how the intent sentences and slots work with Rhasspy. What I mean by this is variables, substitutions, slot programs, etc. I will continue to work on it as I have time. Maybe I can provide you some assistance with what I have figured out in the interim. If you are interested let me know and I will give you my email address. Regards, Joe

[@hsynbrdk]

How do you get those messages from your home assistant?

[@xtremeideaz]

For the Shelly, did you get the 50A clamp or 120A?

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

120A

[@cnjelly7876]

09:23 So the Shelly isn't actual live usage its interval just like the energy monitoring smart plugs?

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

It's very small intervals so it's close enough to live for most use cases.

[@maciejcymerys191]

in configuration.yaml when making themplate at 9:10 your code has the command "state:", that does not work for me, it throws an error straight away. any ideas?

[@sedatmehmed4371]

No you didn't explain that poorly. But honestly people should pay more attention in high school physics classes. Anyway one way to think about it is speed vs distance covered. Power is your current speed and energy is the distance covered.

[@jimmywoody6962]

How did you integrate Octopus Energy tariff into HA? I haven't got the integration, is it though hacks?

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

Yep. It's through HACS

[@fedefede843]

hello. where are you getting the gas consumption from? do you have some kind of sensor installed? cheers!

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

I haven't been able to figure out a way to get Gas consumption in either :(

[@MrKlawUK]

is there any way to pull that in from octopus? I have smart meters for both and getting half hourly reports back for electric *and* gas. Octopus only shows me a day late but better than nothing. Don’t know if there is an integration that can pull from Octopus API. Or Loop which can actually pull that data more often - 2-4 hours delay so not live but not bad

[@HomeAutomationGuy]

@@MrKlawUK I think if you have a smart meter you can get this data from the Octopus HACS integration. github.com/BottlecapDave/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy

[@passionblackbay]

There is the HACS PowerCalc add-on available for detailed smart device monitoring (lights, speakers, switches). Is it also possible to use it with the docker/container installation?

[@sarahjrandomnumbers]

2:42 If an electrician did that, I'd not use them again.

[@Eric_Tennant]

I sell power to the power company.

[@guss2099]

Have you got a firewall installed on internet? Just wondering as with all those things connected, a hacker can easily wreak havoc on the system. 🤔

[@LDN-pup]

Oh, I wish I’d thought of just getting a “decent job that pays really well”! Considering the current climate (excuse the pun), that one out of touch explaina-brag really was an energy efficient way to turn people off your video/channel! (Ok, I admit it… that second pun *might* have been intentional 🙃)

[@davet2667]

Don't be a tosser pal

[@mercedesc350e5]

i just installed this about a week before this video. I think that the new statistics card may simplify this, but i created a utility meter helper (called sensor.electricity_used_today) that resets daily, then 7 statistics template sensors to return the change compared to 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours etc, so i have a real time 'use compared to this time yesterday, 2 days ago etc. I then create a final sensor that is the mean of these 7 sensors to generate a live comparison to my rolling 7 day power use.. a couple of gauge cards on my main dashboard gives me a glance into whether i've run the dishwasher too many times so far today! in sensors.yaml # Electricity sensors to compare with same time over last 7 days - platform: statistics name: "power change 1 day" entity_id: sensor.electricity_used_today state_characteristic: change max_age: hours: 24 precision: 2 sampling_size: 1200000 - platform: statistics name: "power change 2 day" entity_id: sensor.electricity_used_today state_characteristic: change max_age: hours: 48 precision: 2 sampling_size: 1200000 - platform: statistics name: "power change 3 day" entity_id: sensor.electricity_used_today state_characteristic: change max_age: hours: 72 precision: 2 sampling_size: 1200000 - platform: statistics name: "power change 4 day" entity_id: sensor.electricity_used_today state_characteristic: change max_age: hours: 96 precision: 2 sampling_size: 1200000 - platform: statistics name: "power change 5 day" entity_id: sensor.electricity_used_today state_characteristic: change max_age: hours: 120 precision: 2 sampling_size: 1200000 - platform: statistics name: "power change 6 day" entity_id: sensor.electricity_used_today state_characteristic: change max_age: hours: 144 precision: 2 sampling_size: 1200000 - platform: statistics name: "power change 7 day" entity_id: sensor.electricity_used_today state_characteristic: change max_age: hours: 168 precision: 2 sampling_size: 1200000 - platform: min_max name: "power change average 7 day" type: mean round_digits: 2 entity_ids: - sensor.power_change_1_day - sensor.power_change_2_day - sensor.power_change_3_day - sensor.power_change_4_day - sensor.power_change_5_day - sensor.power_change_7_day in templates.yaml - sensor: - name: "Energy Use compared to Weekly average" state: "{{ (((states('sensor.power_change_average_7_day') | float(0) / states('sensor.electricity_used_today') |float(0) ) * 100) | round(0)) }}" unit_of_measurement: "%"