Expand cost information on the energy dashboard

[mr-miles]

Hi,

I'm in the UK and energy costs were a big motivator for me to use homeassistant. I am loving the energy dashboard, it's been really useful in trimming energy usage and scheduling things to times when prices are low.

However, I'm mostly gauging success by eye - the dashboard is mostly centred around usage rather than cost. I'd like to create some minor PRs to expose some extra information in some way and wanted to gauge appetite / interest in discussion as I'm open to ideas about how to present this information ...

Three specific things I am thinking of:

1. In the energy sources card, I would like to see the effective cost / kWh overall, and then for each source - so basically the cost figure (already shown), divided by the energy figure (also already shown). Rationale: my energy supplier provides 3 prices based on time of day (peak, normal, off-peak) and I can use this to optimise load through the day.

2. Energy usage card, I would love to see cost on the chart somehow - it currently just shows usage. Ideally I was thinking of a toggle to switch between kWh and currency.

3. Configuration: adding a way to include standing charges in the cost calculation so I can match up with my electricity bill more closely. I don't think this is currently possible other than by adding a source with a static 0.01 kW usage so it doesn't affect usage figures, and a static cost.

My first thought was to that these could be implemented so they can be set in yaml (i.e. on custom energy dashboards) and so the default behaviour would remain the same.

Would any of this be welcome? @karwosts as you were mentioned when I asked in the forums a while ago

Thanks

[karwosts]

I don't handle feature approvals, so I can't tell you if any of these would be welcome. They seem like ok ideas to me, so maybe?

A few random thoughts:

In the energy sources card, I would like to see the effective cost / kWh overall, and then for each source - so basically the cost figure (already shown), divided by the energy figure (also already shown). Rationale: my energy supplier provides 3 prices based on time of day (peak, normal, off-peak) and I can use this to optimise load through the day.

Realize that we also handle devices with pretty small screens, so if you want to add extra information to this table, think about how it would all fit. There's also compare mode which doubles the number of cells in this table, so adding 1 or 2 more columns might be tough to squeeze in so that it looks good?

Energy usage card, I would love to see cost on the chart somehow - it currently just shows usage. Ideally I was thinking of a toggle to switch between kWh and currency.

If you toggle to currency, what's going to happen to battery/solar flows? They don't have a cost. Maybe just to start you could add the cost to the tooltip? Also it might get weird when you're storing grid to battery, as there are cases when we don't know which tariff is being "consumed" and which is being stored, so we just show a "Combined from grid" bar, but you wouldn't really be able to compute a cost for that.

Configuration: adding a way to include standing charges in the cost calculation so I can match up with my electricity bill more closely. I don't think this is currently possible other than by adding a source with a static 0.01 kW usage so it doesn't affect usage figures, and a static cost.

You'll be asked to make an architectural proposal if you want to change configuration options. There are a few in there from the past related to energy cost stuff that haven't been approved, maybe look for them to get an idea of what to expect.

Best of luck!

[mr-miles]

hmm ... your point about toggling to currency and solar flows got me thinking. Maybe it's a better approach to create a custom module of my proposed energy widgets that i can drop into a custom energy dashboard? That way I can make cards that are specifically about cost, separately from usage - even if they are not very different.

Ultimately, I wanted to avoid duplicating, since some of the cards have aggregation logic in and are quite lengthy. Do you have an opinion about how best to go about that? Feels like there's a model underlying and common to the various energy cards that could be separated out but I might be misreading.

I'm interested in grid to battery (since I'm thinking of getting one). I guess I would need to make some kind of sensor to track the effective cost of the battery source, using the cost and increase in charge over each period. Not sure how I'd go about that yet!

[karwosts]

Ultimately, I wanted to avoid duplicating, since some of the cards have aggregation logic in and are quite lengthy. Do you have an opinion about how best to go about that? Feels like there's a model underlying and common to the various energy cards that could be separated out but I might be misreading.

Yes, several of the cards do seem to repeat the same or very similar calculations. What's even worse is that these calculations return different results in different cards. So while your hourly energy usage chart might show lots of self consumed solar, the daily distribution in the same window for the same day might compute no self consumed solar (the formula gives a different result if computed hourly or aggregate-daily).

I've occasionally thought about pulling these out into one common super-algorithm in data/energy that all the cards can reference, but the formula is pretty terrifyingly complex and has no real testing, so I've been reluctant to attempt it...

And I don't think a custom card will have access to any of these functions/formulas.