Hi everyone, we are preparing for a new webinar primarily for existing PowerShaper Flex HEMS users (although a lot of it will apply to anyone who uses Home Assistant). We wanted to take a deeper dive into creating custom automations to control smart energy appliances in your home. The webinar will take place at 5pm on Wednesday 29th June (we also hope to record it in case you are unable to make it!)
This is not going to be a general introduction to the Home Assistant platform, but don’t worry, if you are new we hope to schedule one for people new to the platform soon!
To keep the webinar focused on practical use cases for you, we wanted to take a couple of real life examples of what you would like to be able to automate, and go through them together. So, if you could share your ideas or hopes for automating the smart appliances in your home below, we will aim to pick a couple to look at in detail.
Please share the make model of the device you are trying to control, and a brief description of what you would like to be able to do.
It would be good to be able to see the cumulative kWh on the EVSE without having to log into it separately and if possible any price signal from Octopus.
Very keen to get involved in what can be done around home automation, smart appliances, and some basic but intelligent control to better utilise energy in the home and beyond!
I’ve just had solar panels, batteries and a Solid hybrid inverter installed at home, and one of the really useful things I’ve been able to do is control the charging of the batteries from home assistant. With some relatively simple templates and automations, plus a few integrations, now have a system which uses the forecasted solar tomorrow to determine how much to charge the batteries by the night before (have an PHEV and Octopus Go). This enables me to both optimise my energy costs but also maximise my solar self use. This is using ‘Forecast.solar’ and a modified version of the ‘Solarman’ integrations.
I’ve found some other useful integrations/hardware to help: Volvo’s OnCall for reading Battery SoC from the car, and Broadlink integration combined with British General’s range of smart sockets for quite a neat retro fit.
Some further automations I really want to achieve:
Home assistant Volvo ‘OnCall’ integration doesn’t currently appear to support setting the Charging times/start/stop charging on the car, but I think some of the underlying libraries do, or at least people using HAB have been able to control some of those features. This would be very useful to maximise and automate solar consumption
A load dumping/shedding automation or integration - complex to describe, but essentially to handle scenarios like: 3kW hybrid inverter, Car charging, turn the kettle on, energy consumption >3kW, temporarily pause car charging to minimise grid consumption. Similar integration could be used to switch on loads/smart devices which don’t care when they run while over generating to reduce grid feed in
I’m also looking to better analyse my historic consumption to try and better predict what my energy consumption tomorrow will be. Some very simple analysis e.g. energy consumption by day of week, month, temperature/solar. I see that we get subscription to PowerShaper, which is also somehow linked to the coop- so would be interested to understand if there are plans for Powershaper to be able to do this type of analysis (perhaps with capability to integrate forecast back into HA?)
Just some ideas for now, will try to join the webinar, also happy to share any of my configs etc. here
Sorry not too clear but in the top right corner it is showing 8:8A Is this 8.8 Amps or is it 8 Amps??
I want to see this in the HA portal
be able to convert Amps into kWh’s
Monitor and control the speed. I want to be able to send any surplus from Solar PV generation to my EV, but not allow the speed of charging to be so high that it pulls from the National Grid. Note, I already have a 15kW battery storage system that acts as a “reservoir” for storage of surplus PV generation from my three Solar PV arrays that total 5.8 kWp. So I want to control the speed of charge so that it can be viable during the 24 hrs period so as not to use up too much from Home battery storage - that is likely to be required for home grid consumption for an evening meal.
Also I want to link-up up predicted sun generation for next day so that my home battery storage system is not “over-full”
Thanks to @matt I can now monitor total export from all three arrays that will either go plus or negative within a certain range. So this should help to me to monitor and control export back to the grid. This could be used within any automation that needs to be created for the above.
Thanks everyone for all the great suggestions! You may have spotted the Eventbrite postponement email but so that we can prepare a real-life scenario and ensure we cover as much as possible, this event will now be combined with the longer Eco Home Lab session on July 14th:
So the webinar tomorrow is no longer taking place - the July 14th session will be recorded in case anyone is unable to attend this later date, thanks everyone!
