Power Monitoring in the 2025.12 release of HA

[bdlhome]

I was pleased to see the Live Power monitoring in the 2025.12 release and excited to play with it after the previous upgrade to allow a device to specify the upstream device.

I quickly added the power sensors for all of my devices but when I went to the battery storage section I found the readings are reversed in the case of the Myenergi integration where charging is shown as a positive and discharge as negative.  In the HA energy dashboard it says to pick a sensor where positive values indicate discharging the battery, negative values indicate charging the battery.
As a work around I used a helper to create a template sensor that is an inverse of internal_load_ct1 sensor.

I also thought about adding a CT clamp on the feed to/from the Libbi and use that as the sensor Instead.
Has anyone else experienced this? I thought I'd post here in case it is useful to others. 

Any thoughts of changing the integration to support what HA expects?

[G6EJD]

In terms of electrical engineering conventions, this is not the first time that HA developers have got their interpretations wrong.

The convention with batteries is when being charged, energy is being added, so is a positive. Conversely when discharged it's losing energy and is a negative.

Without an exception that the majority of electrical engineers will have encountered a positive is adding and negative taking away. The point is this topic needs to be seen from the external circuits that charge and discharge the battery, hence charging is a positive.

It looks like the HA developers have chosen electron flows to form their convention which is by convention - wrong.

The last time I met incorrect thinking was the developers interpretation of Power Factors, where they (ESPHome) reversed the PF readings due to a lack of knowledge, and they rounded up the values to +/-1 and assumed anything less than 1 was irrelevant, how wrong they were.

This subject needs to be debated on the HA forum to let the populace views emerge and electrical engineers to influence the outcome.

The MyEnergi system was designed by reputable electrical engineers who got it right as we should expect.

[bdlhome]

I did post on the HA forum first after a search and was surprised I appeared to be the first to report it.

Given what you've said about convention I'm now even more surprised that other users with battery solutions from other manufactures haven't reported the same behaviour.

In the mean time the helper is working well if others want to make use of the Energy Dashboard in Home Assistant.

[G6EJD]

Why not post your solution here, will help users for sure.

[G6EJD]

I've just reviewed the energy dashboard; never taken much notice of it before, and note that solar energy is shown as a negative value, so it is seen from the load point of view - correct, but then the battery is reversed, which is incorrect.

So it looks like you've uncovered a wider convention issue in use by HA.

If a solar generation system is negative for export, then so too must a battery export of energy be the same.

[LeiChat]

Given what you've said about convention I'm now even more surprised that other users with battery solutions from other manufactures haven't reported the same behaviour.

You prompted me to take a look. I have a GivEnergy AC battery inverter. The HA integration (GivTCP) implements the 'invertor power' entity the way HA (currently) expects it, with positive indicating discharge from the battery.

That said, I have implemented an inverted invertor power sensor entity that I use elsewhere in my HA setup, so sharing the syntax for the 'modern template' syntax (required for HA 2026.6) in case it's of use:

- sensor:
  - name: "GivenergyEX Invertor Power Inverted"
    unique_id: "givenergyex_invertor_power_inverted"
    state: >
      {% set val = states('sensor.givtcp_ceXXXXXXX_invertor_power') | float(0) %}
      {{ (val * -1) | round(0) }}
    device_class: power
    unit_of_measurement: W

Modifying for libbi invertor (charge/discharge) power entity should hopefully just be a case of swapping out the sensor name and modifying the unit if required.

Will be interesting to see if/how it is debated by the HA community.

[bdlhome]

I can't take the credit but this is what I did based on advice from another user.

In HA:
Settings => Devices & services => Helpers => Create helper => Template => Sensor

State:
{{ - (states('sensor.your_sensor) |float) }}

Unit of measurement:
same as the sensor has now

Device class:
Power

State class:
Measurement

Device:
Not needed, but you can select the battery device you already have to add it to that device

Advanced => Availability:
{{ states('sensor.your_sensor) |is_number}}