Adding Z-Wave power monitors to the new Home Assistant Energy Dashboard

Other Devices & Integrations Power Management
1

I posted the video below with how to integrate various Z-Wave power monitors, smart switches and dimmers into the new Energy Dashboard in Home Assistant:

Details in the video and an example of the configuration.yaml file entries below:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uD0QR8hAzqAF6jTnk3X0QxUhAgR04oJo/view?usp=sharing

Really nice to have the hour by hour energy monitoring in the new dashboard.

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2

In early Apr.'22, looks like HomeAssistant had an issue with the Vera integration and has lost the “current_power"w” attributes on Vera-based energy sensors:

Hopefully that will get fixed so the Energy Dashboard will start working again.

3

It looks like actual power meters like the Aeotech Home Energy Monitor devices are reporting watts through to the InfluxDB and Grafana layers. But that data, through HA templates, to provide energy readings in Home Assistant are missing. As is all the switch/dimmer devices that report either actual or user supplied power data that aren’t reporting through to HA (or Influx or Gafana). Also missing is the data from the “CO2 Signal” integration that reports your grid percentage of renewable energy.

Hopefully this will all get fixed in some future update. They seem to be pushing out a lot of updates recently, so perhaps many other things were broken as well.

4

I found this note in the issue thread:

“HA have changed their policy on power attributes, these need to be broken out as separate sensors.
To do this in Vera will require a developer with an active Vera hub to refactor the HA integration. I no longer have a live Vera hub and so can no longer do this.”

Wonder if there is a Vera/Ezlo developer who is familiar with the Home Assistant interface who can help with this. Or perhaps someone in the UK can send the issue owner: pavoniGreg Dowling located in London, an old Vera controller and Zwave switch to get this issue moving again?

5

I did find a way to restore the power readings from the Aeotec home energy monitor devices by changing from the “current_power"w” attribute to the “state” of that sensor, which apparently is what HA reads, because these watt values were showing up OK on the Overview screen yet the KWH readings were not. So I made this change in the configuration.yaml file:

template:

  • sensor:
    • name: “utility_power”
      state: ‘{{ states(“sensor.hemg5_149”) }}’
      icon: mdi:transmission-tower
      unit_of_measurement: “W”

Still looking into some way of reading the power out of things like light switches and dimmers.

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Did you see my comment in the HA community?

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No, I didn’t. Is that on the Ezlo forum or on the Home Assistant site? Is there a link to the comment?

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This is the Ezlo community, run by Ezlo. I have no intention to discuss Home Assistant here, definitely not put links here (not even in PMs). Sorry.

If you go to the other community and search for my comments, you will find it (from ten days or so ago). There I have no problem helping you out.

sunqan

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9

Also - the change is in the Home Assistant product (an Ezlo competitor) and nothing can easily be done in the ezlo products to rectify it.
The main problem is that there is no maintainer for the HA integration (he got rid of his vera a long time ago).
This is one of the weaknesses of Home Assistant as well as one of the strengths.

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10

OK, thanks for the clarification.