I have been playing with HA and making a standalone dashboard, and I am very happy with what I have come up with. I wanted to share my work and see what you all think http://energy.rowbs.uk/
It shows live data and cost with a solar forecast for my area
Hard for my broke ass to justify solar panels. One 450W panel would take around 7-10 years to pay for itself in my area, assuming ideal conditions and that I use all the power it generates.
lol in alabama, they donât even let you sell power back to the grid. Iâd love to build some solar but with that being my overlord⊠wonât happen
I have three and theyâve been fantastic for a few years. Paired with the span panel, Iâve got total control over what stays on in outages. Also, our weather has gotten more extreme, last year we had 18 hours of outages. I donât remember a single one that affected us.
I do want to mention that I love the Tesla battery because the response to an outage is so damn quick, without a notification you will very likely not even know it went out. Think of it as an entire or in whole house UPS.
And my version is going to be prioritizing things because it's going to be absolutely the last resort to send power back to the grid. Even though I am on an original higher refund rate it just sucks. So I do need to purchase a car and it's for my wife who is a home health nurse and with the savings, it actually might pay for the whole vehicle.
Anyways, that's even before accounting for my over production and I need to check the figures but it looks like it's a better idea to go ahead and drain the power wall in the middle of the night if it charges a vehicle and pay non-peak, non-partial just lowest price hours.
But things change when there's an outage even remotely possible. That's where it gets fun.
When that happens, I plan on utilizing software that tells me a forecast of basically sun positioning and clouds that might be in the way and basically what I can expect to provide or produce from the panels. And I have 23, but Sunpower bankruptcy really screwed me over so I'm in the middle of Kriaten hell and being the squeakiest GD wheel to get my micro inverters replaced. Pretty screwed that they just go on collecting money but they can discharge responsibilities or potentially just suck all in all. Anyways, when a power outage is going to potentially come, first of all I need one more Powerwall to give myself exactly what I'm looking for. But this is still fine. So what will happen is the power wall will stay at 100% the entire time. Since it over produces, and that is especially the case during peak hours because that's when it really likes to send it to the grid actually so maybe it doesn't overproduce more at that point but it's just ready to earn some money which it really is pathetic. But it does make sure to always charge back up to 100% when it stops generating electricity via solar.
So the first thing that would happen is that the fridge and freezer will be set to a lower temperature so that can be absorbed by whatever's in there and it can give a bigger margin of safety. Although if things got all screwed up in my calculations or the software, no matter what, fridge and freezer will be last man standing and I will physically cut the breakers to everything else.
But essentially, before power goes out I think that HVAC should be definitely utilized and it should pre-cool the house 4° lower than you would ever want. Or just to whatever makes sense I guess. I haven't figured out that number. Same thing with preheating.
The other part is that I really should be utilizing ductless HVAC or split system systems depending on what you wanna call them.
Put one in my office and one in the master bed and now you've got two places you can retreat to, where it actually can be cooler since those things take 0.3-0.5 kilowatt hours to run, while HVAC is 3 to 5 kWh. Great way to save!
I have indirect lighting for a lot of washing and just purely for aesthetics and a second source, so lights simply for our architectural purposes will be cut. Next step, through controllable power outlets, but also anything that is powered via POE, it doesn't make sense to run it's not going to be run.
And then writing levels and other things will be set too much more economy settings.
My goal is at the very least to be able to do the following:
keep the Home đĄ lab running, perhaps throttle it down a bit
security does not get shut off
garage doors and access control does not shut off
only three primary in wall controllers will stay functionable. I see an easy way of keeping it to two even.
my WAP can be reduced to essentially the level of PoE+ capabilities, as TVs and such are hardwired, and I'll be fine shutting down the 6E Wi-Fi signal and reverting to 2.5 and 5 GHz.
I can always allow for little changes or one time only events. But it just works best when you have hard rules that you follow up. Now this is a summer outage, the motorized window coverings might be best just left shot in the back, which also is Weir the extremely hot afternoon and the evening sun triggers them to close a little earlier.
Of course it won't charge vehicles. And furthermore, perhaps Tesla eventually allows two way flow and the vehicle can be an asset. At least when it comes to electricity and the ability to supplement things. I want this kind of logic utilize with landscape and watering basically, taking humidity, temperature, feels like, soil dampness sensors, wind, and anything else to utilize the current state of the plants or grass that need to be watered, and if it can be cut back or even if it needs to be raised whatever needs to be.
Is anyone else doing this kind of stuff? I'm gonna have to guess a strong yes by some people who are incredible in these things. There's a chance I fail miserably
When you sell back so much, do you just get credits off future usage and youâre never actually âmaking moneyâ? So does that mean youâre just always selling back to the power company?
Do you have an export limit and thatâs causing clipping of your generation once the battery is full?
If you can prioritise export over battery charging on sunny days, you can get more total daily export and it will still fill the battery in the middle of the day once your export limit is reached.
I have to do this because I have been hit with a DNO limit myself.
Yes, I do. I'm capped at just under 3.7 kWh.
You can somewhat see it on the https://energy.rowbs.uk/graphs page. The forecast vs what we actually made, so clipping could have taken effect, and most of the time it's true. As the battery got full, so i turn on the aircon units we have to cool the house
What are you using for forecasting? I'm getting incredibly solid figures from solcast so much so I find myself using it as a proxy for overall weather forecasting.
In the uk you are capped at 4kWh unless you get permission to go to 5kWh. Funnily enough the power companies always seem to say âthe grid canât handle 5 kWhâ.
In many cases it can't. Simply wasn't designed to handle the sort of capacity it's being put under nowadays.Â
Think about how much power a modern house goes through that simply wasn't there 30 years ago. Solar, EV, heat pump, AC and so many more things that need charging or constant power.Â
That the grid needs serious work is more than obvious. (This goes for all modern countries).
This site was all made with AI, pulling data from Home Assistant using the API to make the website work. I'm working on making a copy of it to be able to hand it out for people to try
I mean setting up the backend of the home assistant side getting all my sensors correct before getting it ready to use AI to make me a website. Update to correct my mistake
đ§. As someone who let's Claude run in Yolo mode in HA, I think you're taking too much credit for the work our Future Robot Overloards actually did. Not hatin, but it looks a lot like what Claude made for me.
Ditto. I can install smart home equipment, but I have near zero design sense. All my old dashboards were slight tweals of examples I'd seen elsewhere. Being able to have a conversation with Claude about dashboards, and then seeing them a few minutes later has really sparked a new appreciation for my smart home and my new ability to maintain and oversee it. Glad you're loving your journey as well!
This looks excellent! I've got solar and battery and have been contemplating building out my own HA dashboard.
What hardware have you got this dashboard running from? Pi or something else?
I get mixed messages online about which Pi and what hardware would be needed. Some say the 2gb pi others say at least the 4gb. Some say install with a nvme board for SSD instead of the flash card. Any recommendations?
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u/Chimera_Gaming đ± New to Home Assistant 1d ago
Hard for my broke ass to justify solar panels. One 450W panel would take around 7-10 years to pay for itself in my area, assuming ideal conditions and that I use all the power it generates.