Costs always Zero, Something Always Cancelling Out the Consumption

[fresh scroll]

I wish the energy dashboard was better documented. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I live in a shoebox of a very ancient building, so in no way do I want to mess with any actual meters or put sensors on their equipment. I'm renting of course. I'm not counting on getting the actual total costs of my home, just the main bulk of it so I can estimate my costs from HA instead of having to constantly log in to SCE.com to see my (limited) stats.

Here's a list of what's in my home that I'm currently trying to track. It's not everything that uses power in my home, but It's what I set up for an energy dashboard test run.

• Smart Plugs from TP-Link with power/energy monitoring
-- 2 for Window AC units, one for the primary fridge
• TP-Link smart bulbs with power/energy monitoring
• WiZ smart bulbs
• LG OLED TV (it's used as a monitor for Switch/Mac Mini)
• Mac Studio
• 4 ip rtsp cameras.

Only the smart plugs and the TP-link smart bulbs have built-in energy monitoring so I'm using power-calc to calculate/estimate the rest. I have powercalc make utility meters for daily and monthly usage. Monthly usage resets on the 20th of the month, and I set up tariffs for SuperOffPeak, OffPeak, MidPeak, and OnPeak. I'm working on getting the selections to change tariffs properly, but that's a separate issue.

In powercalc, i made a group for lights, a group for plugs, a manual estimation for the TV and one for the Mac Studio. I also made a group for powercalc to add up the usage and consumption for everything called the "Simulated Meter". I followed many guides on how to set up the energy dashboard, but they're not always clear if I should use a total consumption meter, daily meter, or some other meter to put into certain spots. I've been doing trial and error for a while, and sometimes it seems to work, but the next day, it acts like for every watt I use, there's a watt of negative usage leaving everything at zero.

Based on my "Energy Flow" graph at the bottom of the dashboard, I believe I've correctly grasped the idea of upstream devices so that nothing is double-counted. I don't have solar panels, so there no way to give back to the grid. I didn't expect this to be this complicated.

Hopefully when I get this resolved, others can learn from my suffering.

[vernal wharf]

From the energy dashboard’s perspective, meter resets are irrelevant. You could have a meter entity reset every 15 minutes or never reset at all, and the dashboard won’t know the difference.

Can you expand on how the simulated meter gets calculated?

[vernal wharf]

If you are able, the best option is to not use resetting utility meters. Especially when you’re calculating an entity by adding up a bunch of other ones. What ends up happening is that the calculated entity gets updated each time one of the referenced sensors update. And they will not all reset to zero at the same time (down to the same microsecond), so your calculated sensor ends up stairstepping down to zero. And depending on the device class of that calculated sensor, that may be seen as big spikes of energy returned to the grid at midnight, as opposed to a meter reset

[fresh scroll]

Well, as far as I can tell, there's no way to get readings for the simulated meter separated by tariffs that don't reset.

Also, today's readings seem to have almost worked correctly.

[vernal wharf]

It doesn’t matter if the simulated meter resets or not. It’s all the entities it references. I’m also not sure what powercalc does when creating a group; I’d avoid using it for your simulated meter so that you have total control of how it is set up

[fresh scroll]

I seriously wish I understood more of what's going on behind the scenes, because it's finally telling me something is costing something, but there's still fake negative usage.