I’ve been using Homey for about a year, mostly for simple home automation tasks like lightning and curtains.
Now venturing into power optimization because I am noticing that my power consumption is higher than expected and I just found out my (newly built) home has a 35 A connection to the power grid where 25 A is standard, but this comes at a hefty price tag of 3x the cost of 25 A. I assume the builder chose for 35 A because the home as 2 car chargers (3-phase) combined with a 3-phase heat pump and electric stove. If all these would run at full capacity, 25 A will probably not suffice. The house has solar panels, but there is no need to use any excess power from them to charge the car yet (because I’m in the Netherlands, an until 2027 the utility will purchase my excess power at the same rate to what I’m charged)
I assume however that 25 A will be sufficient 99.9% of the time. if possible, I’d like to eliminate that remaining percentile and cash the savings.
So I would like your recommendations:
option 1: use a standard P1 meter, combined with the Easee Homey app and flow to monitor power consumption. When the consumed current exceeds 20 A, either shut off Easee or limit it to 6 A until consumption drops below 9 A. Question for this scenario: should I cut Easee’s consumption when any of the 3 phases exceeds 20 A? Or will it somehow balance itself out when only one phase shows a heavy current but the other 2 have plenty of capacity left?
added bonus is that I should be able to start using excess solar power in the future when the rules change.
option 2: get an Easee Equalizer, eliminating the need for Homey to be involved at all. Trade-off: this device looks like it is essentially a p1 meter with some custom software added for load balancing. It’s target audience seems larger installations with many chargers, but I assume it will cover my scenario as well. For a p1 meter, it seems somewhat overpriced, and tackling this problem myself seems like an fun project/challenge.
option 3: keep paying for 35 A (which is about 1000 euro/year more expensive than 25 A)
It looks like a lot of folks here have been tackling my problem for longer than I have, I would appreciate any tips and feedback.
Would chaging the device class to “evcharger” in the next update be problematic? This way it will show up in the new Energy tab. Not sure if it’s useful for anything else yet
It will appear there after Athom will implement it - I guess that might be quite soon, you can check eventually also Beta version of Mobile app, unless you have it already
First of all great App! I am figuring out how to optimize the usage of my solar system to load my EV. I though I could use the charger status changed to car connected as trigger for my flows. However, when I connect my car to the charger, this status is not triggered. Am I misunderstanding the usage of this particular charger status, or overlooking something?
You can use the flow I described here.
Different charger, but works similar.
(I started with the easee charger, then switched to Amina) had the same setup for the easee.
(I you cant figure it out I can share it)
For the easee charger its even a bit simpler because you do not need the phase switching
Hi, I run the latest Fw on homey pro 12.4.4-rc.2 and have App version 1.8.6 experimental but the visibility of the car and charger in energy are gone.
I run the latest app on my ios (9.2.1 (1734)
The garage is closed
I had it visible, but now it is gone, FW homey that broke something?
Hi @Richard_B I have been in discussion with Easee for about a week now. I’m testing their charger for my platform (FWD.nl) and we’re experiencing an issue in which Homey sets the charger to max A every time it’s starting (turned on). Might this be a hidden function of the ‘turn on’ card? When I start the charger and set it to 6A, it’s set to 16A (max) immediately. It’s not Easee (they checked it all) so it must be Homey?
Any issues around start/stop charging from the unit gui button? I’m only getting timeouts, but everything updates fine if I start charging from the Easee android app.
I tried 4-5 times yesterday evening, and suddenly one of the start/stop charging started the charger.. So works sometimes to start.. As far as I have tested, every time to stop charging..
This started recently with an update of Easee Homey app. The current was set to 40A, but the charger reduce it to 16A.
What I found out: I changed my start flow so that current, 7A, is set first and then On-command so now I can start with 7A if I want to.
Hi Morgan, thanks. But that’s what I did. I first set the current to 6A and then set the charger to ‘on’. But still it goes do 16A. This happens everytime after it stops or pauses.
But, then after it starts I should be able to roll back to 6?
