Energy: add support for Biomass (wood)

[karwosts]

Following the suggestion from #1311 (comment) I would like to add support for some new categories in energy, based on what I have seen requested repeatedly by many users.

I want these to be fairly simple generic types, so aside from defining a couple constants per type like name, color, icon, and supported device classes, they will all be handled by generic code, so it will be very lightweight to add new types.

First I will propose Biomass. (I believe commonly also called wood chips or wood pellets, but I will prefer a more generic term).

The supported device classes will be either weight or energy, mutually exclusive like the current gas implementation. (could maybe add volume someday as a 3rd option but I don't think that is as common). Any units from the weight or energy device class will be valid.

There will be no support for individual devices, just something very similar for what we have now for gas:

• A single bar chart of consumption
• An entry in the sources table

(I will suggest more types once this is approved, but I will start slow to not fragment the conversation everywhere).

[balloob]

How would one get this data into Home Assistant / are there integrations that are already supporting this?

[karwosts]

Palazzetti is one official integration that seems to have support for pellet measurement:
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/palazzetti

• Pellet quantity (kg - cumulative quantity consumed)

KWB possibly another:
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/kwb/

Aside from this, gathering some quotes from users:

• "Many boiler controllers (e.g., ecoMAX, Plum, Technix and others) expose pellet consumption via Modbus, MQTT, or custom integrations."
• "I have a REST sensor that reads the total pellet comsumptiion from my ETA pellet burner."

Beyond that I'm not sure if there are others. I had seen the request so many times that I assumed it must be coming from somewhere.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/energy-wood-pellets-wood-chips-oil/505299
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/energy-dashboard-wood-pellets-consumption/376702
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/energy-adding-pellets-and-wood-to-gaz-and-electricity/335031
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/custom-consumptions-for-energy-dashboard-wood-pellets-water-oil/405326
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/having-diffrent-sources-for-heating-in-energy-dashboard/486957
https://github.com/orgs/home-assistant/discussions/1722

[karwosts]

Edited/added what details I could find. If that is not enough, I will reach out to the community to see if we can come up with some other sources/ideas, perhaps we need to push some more of these custom integrations into core. But it does seem like the demand is there with the existing sources.

[frenck]

I wonder how this would work. For example, In my new situation, I'll end up with a Hybrid heat pump (consuming electricity for heating, and gas for DHW + fallback for heating very cold weather). But I also will have a pellet stove that works with both pellets and wood blocks...

The issue I see here is making sense of the heating combinations. If I track Gas in m3.. what would that mean for pellets in kg? Combined? Or do we add another things besides Gas? Isn't gas a biomass as well? :)

[karwosts]

If I track Gas in m3.. what would that mean for pellets in kg?

I don't think it means anything... I would just assume they are separate/unrelated?

You will have one chart of your gas consumption, and another chart of wood consumption in kg. You will have one line entry in the table for the cost of your gas, and another line entry in the table for the cost of your wood.

For each "resource" you consume, there would be a separate accounting of that resource. I don't think we really need to "make sense" of it, just people want to be able to see/track their consumption in a consistent way.

Isn't gas a biomass as well? :)

I'm not the expert but I didn't think so. I think biomass is generally the catchall term for burning of renewable, previously and recently living organism, such a wood, corn, or other agricultural product. I wouldn't count fossil fuel like gas or oil. Those typically have different units as well (units of volume), where it seems the biomass is more typically measured in mass/weight, thus making them not convertible.

[balloob]

Yeah, I would also expect them to be separate charts.

[AJediIAm]

Edit: The suggestion below is moved to #1335. It is not an alternative, but an addition to this proposal.

Alternative: Convert all heat generation to joules
Fossil fuels like propane gas, hydrogen, pellets, wood and oil are all joules in different chemical packaging. Depending on the type, they have working units in volume (m3, L or gallons) or weight (kg, lb) with a predictable conversation to joules.
The joules in pellets and woods depending on the exact contents, so this is something a user or integration might need to provide. Propane, hydrogen and oil have standard conversions from volume to joules which can be hardcoded in home assistant.

District heating (stadsverwarming in Dutch) uses gigajoules as the standard unit. Dutch smart meters already provide gigajoule to track heat consumption for stadsverwarming and users pay per gigahoule.

Hybrid heatpumps like @frenck is getting can also calculate the heat output in joules for the electrical heat pump. My heat pump had an internal sensor for both the energy input and heat output. Other heatpumps can use a conversation based on the COP. The heating dashboard could show how much heat is produced by using gas and how much heat is produced using electricity as well as the cost for each in a stacked bar chart similar to electricity. This would be a very interesting chart to keep track of.
The same approach applies for infrared and other supplementary heating solutions.

Having the total amount of heat production would be extremely valuable data to predict the amount of heat needed in the future (based on historical data and the predicted outside temperature) for the next phase of the energy dashboard.

Finally, there is such a thing as a thermal battery. They are not very popular yet, but it would make the comparison to energy management complete.

Summary:
It's not the most trivial solution but I think the benefits to predict the future heating needs and the extra level of insight this solution would give for any form of hybrid setup is very significant. I hope this option will be considered and I'd be happy to help with a more detailed design.

[karwosts]

I guess the question is what are we really trying to track here: resource inputs, or energy output?

I guess with the current gas setup (allowing to choose volume or energy) we are allowing user to choose one or the other, but not both?

I'm not sure where heat pumps fit into the picture yet, as they seem to fit pretty clearly an individual electrical device (they are powered by the grid afterall), but they also have extra heat output information that may be interesting.

I know more support for heat pump is of interest to the users, though it's not clear to me exactly what that looks like, and I'm not sure if that's too far distant from this proposal to be discussed here.

[Matze5593]

Feature Request: Rename "Gas" to "Heating Energy" in Energy Dashboard

Problem Description

The current Energy Dashboard uses the specific term "Gas" for tracking thermal energy consumption. While this works for many, it is too restrictive for the growing number of users who use alternative heating sources.

In my specific setup, I use a Fröling P4 pellet boiler. I monitor the fuel consumption via ESPHome (RS485 Modbus RTU) and convert the pellet weight into energy using a template sensor (e.g., $1,kg \times 4.8 = 4.8,kWh$).

While the tracking itself works, seeing carbon-neutral wood pellets labeled as "Gas" in the UI is misleading and visually inconsistent.

Proposed Solution

I propose renaming the "Gas" category to a more generic term like "Heating Energy" or "Thermal Energy".

Ideally, the UI should:

1. Change the display label from "Gas" to "Heating".
2. (Optional) Allow users to choose an icon that matches their fuel source (e.g., mdi:wood-burning for pellets, mdi:fire for gas, or mdi:radiator for district heating).

Rationale

• Inclusivity: Many modern or sustainable homes use pellets, biomass, district heating (Fernwärme), or even oil. "Gas" does not represent these users.
• Accuracy: A pellet boiler is not a gas appliance. The dashboard should reflect the actual energy carrier used.
• User Experience: For users integrating their boilers via ESPHome or other custom integrations, the current naming feels like a "workaround" rather than a native feature.

Additional Context

Even if the underlying database structure or statistics_id continues to use "gas" for backward compatibility, the Frontend display name should be customizable or generalized to improve the user experience for everyone not using natural gas.

[karwosts]

Personally my preference is that we categorize each input resource separately (as in the initial proposal). Reasons:

• Not all gas consumption is necessarily what I would consider as "heating". It may be also for cooking, running a dryer, heating a pool, running a gas firepit, outdoor BBQ, etc.
• Automatic label & color & icon assignments.
• Allows for possibility of multiple types of "heating", some which may not have compatible units of measurement. I can track my heat pump in kWh, my gas in m3, and my wood pellets in kg, and plot them in their natural units of consumption.
• Avoids encouraging user to arbitrarily rename charts to be something not intended.

[luka6000]

I understand the reasoning behind keeping every energy source in its original unit — it’s familiar and it reflects how utilities bill us. But after building a combined energy dashboard, I’ve found that using a common unit actually reveals far more useful information.

We pay for energy carriers (gas, pellets, district heating, electricity), each with its own unit and price. Yet all of them ultimately deliver the same thing: energy. Once everything is expressed in a common unit like kWh, patterns that were invisible in separate-unit tracking become obvious. I can finally compare district heating with electricity, understand what 1 GJ actually means in practice, and calculate my real cost per kWh regardless of the carrier. That clarity directly affects decisions — for example, whether using an AC heat pump is economically more sensible than pellets. Now I know, that in a single winter week of heating my household is using more energy then whole month of electricity usage.

Separate units let you track sources. A unified unit lets you understand energy usage. Those are different goals. And we definitely want to keep electricity separately from all the rest.
Maybe the most flexible solution would be to support both: carrier‑specific units and an optional common‑unit view for people who want deeper insight. And once that foundation exists, we can go even further — even something like car gasoline can be converted into an energy estimate. Why not include that in a household‑wide energy dashboard?

[AJediIAm]

Edit: I moved the discussion on the solution direction to this topic: #1335

[karwosts]

If you follow my link to my previous discussion, you can see that "custom sections" as an idea was declined. So that's how I ended up here, suggesting that we simply define more fixed sections that would have popular usage.

[parautenbach]

I see value in having both the metered units, but also a single, comparable energy unit, even if the latter needs to be an estimate or conversion where the metered unit isn't an energy unit. But, it makes water consumption the odd one out.

[AJediIAm]

Apologies for some of the edits. I noticed it breaks the flow of the discussion. I created a dedicated topic to discuss the bigger picture here #1335 to allow this discussion to get back on track with the original proposal.

When digging into the details for I moved the discussion on the solution direction to this topic: #1335, I came to the conclusion that the energy dashboard is in essence tracking common utilities such as electricity, gas and water. Extending this with additional utilities makes a lot of sense. Biofuel is the most common heating utility in europe after gas and electricity. It doesn't benefit from the standardized smart meter, but that shouldn't hold this proposal back.

I'm confident adding biomass as a common utility will not interfere with all the good suggestions and improvements discussed above. Heat or climate can be added as a layer on top of the the energy management dashboard, similar to how solar and batteries have their own place on top of the electrical grid utility.