i think the utility meter integration on this list might be the most underutilized integration in home assistant the utility meter integration allows you to create a sensor that monitors power usage over a period of time at least i think that's what its intended purpose was based on its name and you could totally use it for that to set this up simply define the utility meter section in your URL_TOKEN then you need a source which will be the sensor or entity you want to track and cycle cycle is the time period and it can be quarterly hour all the way up to yearly what makes this useful is that it does math for you let's say you have a smart plug that reports power consumption in kilowatt hours and just keeps a running total so every time you look at the sensor you get the total power this plug has used since the beginning of time or at least until its buffer ran out and the counter went back to zero but what if you wanted to know how much power this plug has used in the last week so that home assistant can let you know if it's using more than the previous week just set up a sensor that looks at your power sensor and define the cycle or time period you want to track but since we're doing this in home assistant we don't have to exactly follow the rules in fact in smart home there are more guidelines than actual rules the front door motion counter we created with history stats can now be made more useful by pointing this integration at it and we can get the hourly count of the motion at the front door if you have a local rain gauge integrated directly into home assistant this integration can give you a daily and weekly rainfall sensor if you wanted to track how much power your washing machine used every day define it as daily washing machine power and set the cycle to daily this integration like some of the others is not based on your history data though so it will start from zero when you add it but once it's run for two cycles you'll get both the current period and the last period from there you could create automations that trigger based on large changes in sensor value between the current cycle and the previous cycle and you wouldn't have to do any of that math home assistant would do it for you or perhaps just use that data as context to make your automation smarter in any case i hope this brief look at these five integrations get you a little closer to the smart home of your dreams if you found this video useful hit that like button and consider subscribing to my channel if you haven't already for more smart home content like this let me know in the comments if any of these integrations sparked new ideas for automations in your smart home and as always thanks for taking time out of your smart home projects to watch mine until next time go automate the boring stuff
START_INTERACTION_TOKEN if you found this video useful hit that like button and consider subscribing to my channel if you haven't already for more smart home content like this let me know in the comments if any of these integrations sparked new ideas for automations in your smart home END_INTERACTION_TOKEN