Energy Meter from Power Meter is no workie

[gregtakacs]

I have a solar inverter that has 3 MPPTs which measure power but not energy. I only have energy for the aggregate of the 3 MPPTs which is generally fine, however they are covering three separate panel arrays facing three different ways so for me to get a better PV generation estimate I need to measure and estimate/forecast them separately.

This is where powercalc comes in. I figured I could just add a few lines of code to my configuration.yaml and it would generate the energy sensor for me.

This is what I have in my configuration.yaml:

powercalc:
    enable_autodiscovery: false
sensor:
  - platform: powercalc
    entity_id: sensor.pv_power_1
    power_sensor_id: sensor.pv_power_1
    name: East PV Panels

However in my log file I get the following message:

2023-06-06 02:57:23.804 DEBUG (MainThread) [custom_components.powercalc.sensors.energy] Found existing energy sensor 'sensor.battery_energy_in' for the power sensor 'sensor.pv_power_1'

Which is definitely wrong. I do have an energy sensor called sensor.battery_energy_in but it's coming from the MQTT broker of my inverter and is measuring total energy dumped in the battery.

I assume this is a bug.

[gregtakacs]

OK, just for fun I added the two other sides:

powercalc:
    enable_autodiscovery: false
sensor:
  - platform: powercalc
    entity_id: sensor.pv_power_1
    power_sensor_id: sensor.pv_power_1
    name: East PV Panels
  - platform: powercalc
    entity_id: sensor.pv_power_2
    power_sensor_id: sensor.pv_power_2
    name: South PV Panels
  - platform: powercalc
    entity_id: sensor.pv_power_3
    power_sensor_id: sensor.pv_power_3
    name: West PV Panels

logger:
  default: warning
  logs:
    custom_components.powercalc: debug

And I got the following:

2023-06-06 03:12:43.562 DEBUG (MainThread) [custom_components.powercalc.sensors.energy] Found existing energy sensor 'sensor.battery_energy_in' for the power sensor 'sensor.pv_power_1'
2023-06-06 03:12:43.562 DEBUG (MainThread) [custom_components.powercalc.sensors.energy] Found existing energy sensor 'sensor.battery_energy_in' for the power sensor 'sensor.pv_power_2'
2023-06-06 03:12:43.563 DEBUG (MainThread) [custom_components.powercalc.sensors.energy] Found existing energy sensor 'sensor.battery_energy_in' for the power sensor 'sensor.pv_power_3'

[gregtakacs]

OK, I think I know what the problem is:

The code just assumes that a device has one power and one energy entity (it just picks up the first energy entity from the device), however for my use case the MQQT integration brings in a multitude of energy sensors and power sensors that are NOT related to each other.

Suggested solution:
Allow a flag to force create an energy sensor even if there is already one (or many) within the device.

[bramstroker]

yes that's correct. Powercalc tries to find an energy sensor on the same device as the power sensor.
I will consider introducing a flag force_energy_sensor_creation or something like that.
PR is welcome as well if you are able to do it.

[gregtakacs]

Done! #1697