Groups

Powercalc provides several options to group individual power sensors into a single one which sums the total. This can be very useful to get a glance about the consumption of all your lights together for example.

Create group with GUI

You can create a new group with the GUI using this button.

When this is not working.

Go to Settings -> Devices & Services
Click Add integration
Search and click Powercalc

Select Group and follow the instructions.

Tip

After you have created a group you can directly assign a virtual power sensor to it when creating the power sensor by selecting the group in the Group field

Create group with YAML

You can combine the entities option and create_group to group individual power sensors into a group.

powercalc:
  sensors:
    - create_group: All hallway lights
      entities:
        - entity_id: light.hallway
        - entity_id: light.living_room
          linear:
            min_power: 0.5
            max_power: 8

This will create the following entities:

sensor.hallway_power
sensor.hallway_energy
sensor.living_room_power
sensor.living_room_energy
sensor.all_hallway_lights_power (group sensor)
sensor.all_hallway_lights_energy (group sensor)

Nesting groups

You can also nest groups, this makes it possible to add an entity to multiple groups.

powercalc:
  sensors:
    - create_group: All lights
      entities:
        - entity_id: light.a
        - entity_id: light.b
        - create_group: Upstairs lights
          entities:
            - entity_id: light.c
            - create_group: Bedroom Bob lights
              entities:
                - entity_id: light.d

Each group will have power sensors created for the following lights:

All lights: light.a, light.b, light.c, light.d
Upstairs lights: light.c, light.d
Bedroom Bob lights: light.d

Warning

a maximum nesting level of 5 groups is allowed!

Hide individual sensors

To hide individual power sensors, and only have the group sensor available in HA GUI you can use the hide_members option. When you used the GUI to create the group sensor you can use the Hide members toggle.

Adding non powercalc sensors

Sometimes you want to add some power and energy sensors to your group which already exist in your HA installation. For example some Zwave/Zigbee plug with built-in power monitoring.

In YAML you can use the power_sensor_id and energy_sensor_id options for that. Let’s assume your smart plug provides sensor.heater_power and sensor.heater_kwh. We want to add these to the group Living Room.

You can use the following configuration:

powercalc:
  sensors:
    - create_group: Living Room
      entities:
        - power_sensor_id: sensor.heater_power
          energy_sensor_id: sensor.heater_kwh
        - entity_id: light.hallway #Powercalc sensor

Note

When you don’t supply energy_sensor_id, but only power_sensor_id powercalc tries to find a related energy sensor on the same device. When it cannot find one Powercalc will create an energy sensor.

If you use the GUI to create the groups you can use Additional power entities and Additional energy entities options.

../_images/group_additional_entities.png

Also see Real power sensor

Domain groups

Powercalc makes it easy to create a group sensors for all entities of a given domain with the create_domain_groups option. For example let’s assume you want group sensors for all your lights and media players you can use the following configuration.

powercalc:
  create_domain_groups:
    - light
    - media_player

Note

This will only include all virtual power sensors created with powercalc, not any other power sensors already available in your HA installation.

Automatically include entities

Powercalc has some options to automatically include entities in your group matching certain criteria. This can be useful to you don’t have to manually specify each and every sensor.

See Dynamically including entities for more information.

Force creating Riemann sum sensor

By default the group energy sensor created by Powercalc is a simple sum of the energy sensors of the individual entities. When you have create_energy_sensor: false for the individual entities, the group energy sensor will not be created. force_calculate_group_energy can be used to force the creation of a Riemann sum sensor for the group. This will take the group power sensor as the source and integrate it over time.

For example:

powercalc:
  sensors:
    - create_group: all lights
      create_energy_sensor: true
      force_calculate_group_energy: true
      entities:
        - create_group: living lights
          create_energy_sensor: false
          entities:
            - entity_id: light.tv_lamp
            - entity_id: light.reading_light
            - ...

This way you can still create an energy sensor even when the individual entities don’t have one. When you are not interested in the individual energy sensors of each light this could be a good solution.

Important

Beware that if your group also consists of Daily fixed energy sensors the Riemann sum sensor will not be accurate, as it’s could be missing the data of this sensor, because it does not always have a power sensor. So you only must use this option when the group power sensor contains all the power data from individual entities.