Updating price from Home Assistant fails because "The input string 'unavailable' was not in a correct format." about teslamateagile HOT 3 CLOSED

Interesting! You should be able to work around this by using an automation to update an input_number integration when the Octopus integration entity changes rather than using the value of it directly. This should avoid the entity becoming unavailable if it depends on cloud sources such as the Octopus one and also allows it to be updated by other sources too if you have e.g. incoming solar energy.

In my case, I use Octopus Intelligent and I have a similar automation because that integration doesn't tell me the price, only if it's currently on the "low" or "high" prices, so I use that to update my input_number appropriately.

I don't think it would necessarily always be a good idea to ignore "unavailable" states as this could result in silent inaccurate measurements, which as you say may not be the correct fix for every use case, so for you and anyone else with similar issues, I would recommend doing this.

from teslamateagile.

Thanks @MattJeanes what you suggested is actually a very good idea, I created a simple automation

alias: Copy Octopus Tracker Electricity Rate to Teslamate
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - sensor.octopus_energy_electricity_xxxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxxxxxx_current_rate
condition:
  - condition: not
    conditions:
      - condition: state
        entity_id: >-
          sensor.octopus_energy_electricity_xxxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxxxxxx_current_rate
        state: unavailable
      - condition: state
        entity_id: >-
          sensor.octopus_energy_electricity_xxxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxxxxxx_current_rate
        state: unknown
action:
  - service: input_number.set_value
    metadata: {}
    data:
      value: >-
        {{
        states('sensor.octopus_energy_electricity_xxxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxxxxxx_current_rate')
        | float }}
    target:
      entity_id: input_number.teslamateoctopustracker
mode: single

This should copy the electricity rate from the Octopus add-on to a numeric input "input_number.teslamateoctopustracker" when the status is not "unknown" or "unavailable", I'm sure it can be massively improved (I'm not great with templating) but it seems to do the job.

from teslamateagile.

That looks perfect to me, nice!

Hopefully that does the job for you, so I'll go ahead and close this :)

from teslamateagile.