Inferring energy usage from other HomeAssistant sensors

[wild stirrup]

I have smart lights which report their on/off status and % on/power in HA.

Given they all have the same bulbs (4W I think), would it be possible to estimate their power usage and show this in HA's energy view?

E.g.

total_power=0
for light in lights:
  if light.status == "on":
    total_power=+(4*light.power_level)

Then I could use a template to turn power into energy for the daily view.

Has anyone tried this? Is this a bad idea?

[void pelican]

There is a HACS integration that does this I think.

[void pelican]

https://github.com/bramstroker/homeassistant-powercalc
then there is also
https://github.com/zacs/ha-energycalc

[void pelican]

Also for converting power to energy you can use the helper which makes use of the "integration" integration. There is details on doing this in the Documentation HERE.

[wild stirrup]

I've done this for my solar/battery which worked well 👍

[void pelican]

We love the integration integrating for the integration of the integrated data integrated from another integration.

"Abbott and Costello" Style jokes aside...powercalc is probably what you are looking for 😛
I haven't used it personally but am aware of it and its on my list of things to mess with "at some point".

[wild stirrup]

Yeah it looks like exactly what I'm looking for

I guess I finally need to get HACS setup

[void pelican]

You could manually install the integration but yeah... its easier to get hacs running and comes in handy in any case.

What type of HA install do you have HAOS or Container?

[wild stirrup]

Container

[void pelican]

You just drop into the container shell pull and run a script then restart the container and can add the HACS integration.

[wild stirrup]

I'm following: https://hacs.xyz/docs/use/download/download/

I was and am hesitatnt about linking my GitHub, not from a security perspective but more from a separation/privacy side

But I don't think there are other options 🙁

[void pelican]

Yeah, That's the one. container tab has the steps.

[void pelican]

It has very limited permissions. It's just so it can download stuff as "you".

If it used a generic API key to pull data and download stuff then it would get blocked due to limits.

Prior to V2 It did pull some stuff via a generic key I think but it became unsustainable and made GitHub a bit angry.

[mortal apex]

Could always create a new account to link and keep "main" account separate?

[wild stirrup]

I ended up just biting the bullet

Now my problem is that I have installed PowerCalc and it is working. I've set it up on 3 bulbs and added them to my energy calculations/dashboard

But these bulbs use like 0.005KWh per day, and I have 30+ of them, so I would prefer to group them into a single lighting entity than have this individual device usage be flooded with entity so I can't see the real power users.

Any ideas on how to do that?

E.g. this doesn't scale for 30-40 bulbs

[void pelican]

Create a sensor group helper of type "Sum" then add all your bulb individual energy entities to this group. then you will have an entity which is the summed power use of all the bulbs. you can then add this to the energy dashboard instead instead of all the individual ones. that way instead of spam you just get "My awesome big group of bulbs" (or whatever more appropriate name you select for your group).

[wild stirrup]

Thanks, I've given this a try

Do you know if there is a way to sum an attribute for all devices with a given tag rather than adding them manually?

[wild stirrup]

https://www.home-assistant.io/template-functions/sum/#total-energy-consumption-across-meters

This looks like what I want but I need to figure where/how to write that

[void pelican]

If you want to do it a semi-lazy way then you could install this from HACS:
https://github.com/gjohansson-ST/attribute_as_sensor
That allows you to create helpers that break out attributes into their own sensors then you could just use the a sum group on them...

[lethal vortex]

You can just create group sensors directly with Powercalc, https://docs.powercalc.nl/sensor-types/group. Has all kind of options to combine multiple power sensors in a single group. Hope this helps.

[wild stirrup]

Amazing, this was super simple to setup!

I'll check in tomorrow to see if it worked 🤞

[wild stirrup]

Thanks for the option and the original powercalc recommendation