Glossary
The glossary explains in plain language the terms used elsewhere in these docs.
Prices and the market
Bidding zone (also price area, price region)
The area your electricity price is set for. Not the same as a country: Sweden has four zones, Norway five, Italy seven, while Germany and Luxembourg share one. Your bill or your supplier's information usually names yours. The supported regions page lists all 43 zones.
Day-ahead price
The wholesale price set one day in advance in an auction, per slot, per bidding zone. This is what "spot price" means in a household context: tomorrow's prices are decided in the early afternoon today and do not change afterwards.
Spot price
In Kilowahti, the market price for a slot with your VAT and supplier commission applied. The raw market price arrives in Kilowahti excluding VAT; the spot_price sensor always shows it to you including VAT.
Slot
The unit of time prices are set for: 15 minutes (96 per day) or 1 hour (24 per day), depending on your configuration. Prices are constant within a slot and can change whenever the slot changes.
Resolution
The length of the slot you use: 15 minutes or one hour. Choose according to the metering interval of your electricity contract.
Commission (also margin)
The per-kWh amount your supplier adds on top of the spot price. Entered gross, VAT included.
Transfer price (also grid fee, network fee, distribution)
The price your grid operator charges for delivering the electricity to you, separate from what you pay your supplier for the energy itself. Often a third or more of the total electricity cost.
Tier
A time-based rule inside a transfer price group: a price per kWh plus when it applies (months, weekdays, hours). The first matching tier by priority wins.
Fixed-price period
A time period during which a fixed contract price replaces the spot price. See fixed-price periods.
Gross / net
Gross means VAT included, net means excluding. Everything you type into Kilowahti is gross; everything arriving from the market is net, and VAT is added for you automatically.
Other Kilowahti terms
Energy price (also electricity price)
What you pay per kWh for the electricity itself: the spot price on a spot contract, your contract rate during a fixed-price period. Transfer excluded.
Total price
Energy price plus transfer price. The number that most closely matches your bill.
Rank
Where the current slot sits among the same day's slots, starting from the cheapest. 1 is the cheapest of the day; the rank of the most expensive price is always the number of slots (24 or 96, depending on resolution). Slots that cost the same share a rank, so during a fixed-price period the energy price rank of every slot is 1. The total price rank is still affected by the transfer price during a fixed-price period, so it can vary even if the energy price stays the same all day.
Quartile
The same idea in four coarser buckets, usually written Q1-Q4. Q1 = cheapest quarter of the day, Q4 = most expensive.
Control factor
The rank expressed as a number between 0 and 1, with 1.0 at the cheapest and 0.0 at the most expensive. Made for feeding into automations that have a dial rather than a switch: charging current, heating setpoint, fan speed. See the control factor guide.
Bipolar
The same value on a ā1 to +1 scale instead of 0 to 1. Use it when you want a signed number that tells whether the price is cheaper or more expensive than usual.
Threshold
Your definition of "cheap enough". There are two: a price threshold in currency per kWh, and a rank threshold as a position in the day. Both drive binary sensors, triggers, and conditions, and both can be adjusted straight from a dashboard in everyday use.
Score
A 0ā100 measure of how well your actual consumption was directed to the day's cheap slots. See optimization scores.
Eager polling
The afternoon time window in which Kilowahti keeps checking for tomorrow's prices until they appear.
Home Assistant terms
Entity
One value in Home Assistant, e.g. sensor.kilowahti_home_total_price. Kilowahti creates a set of them for each configured entry.
Binary sensor
An entity whose state is always either on or off, for example "the price is acceptable right now".
Number entity
A value you can set from the interface as well as read. Kilowahti's thresholds are number entities, so you can change them from a dashboard once you have added them to a card.
Trigger / condition
A trigger starts an automation when something happens, and a condition decides whether the triggered automation may run or is stopped right away. Kilowahti provides its own of both.
Recorder
The part of Home Assistant that writes entity values to the database, forming their raw history. Kilowahti's price arrays are deliberately kept out of it.
Long-term statistics
The long-lived hourly summaries Home Assistant keeps for numeric entities. Hourly statistics are stored separately from the raw history, which Home Assistant prunes over time.