I am measuring power and energy consumption in my home with a bunch of different ZigBee power clamps, accessed through zigbee2mqtt. I am using devices which have several different clamps, so I can’t give the device itself a meaningful name in zigbee2mqtt. For example, the device “powerclamp3” provides “sensor.powerclamp3_power_b” which happens to measure our garage, so I gave it a descriptive name.
But I now realized that this may cause a problem at some point in the future when I need to replace the device or simply rearrange which clamps measure what. What I need are stable aliases like “sensor.garage_power” which I can point to the current source of that information.
I suppose I can do that with a template sensor. Are there better ways?
Is there a way to configure the original sensor so that its values are not recorded in the long-term statistics? That would be duplication that I won’t need.
If I do this, is there a way to salvage past statistics such that I have statistics for “sensor.garage_power” even though I only now defined that alias?
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