After the latest releases 2.17.0 and 2.17.1 it limits my water heater a lot.
Do I missing a new setting ?
my wife was not to happy about the cold shower 
There shouldn’t be any related changes affecting planning. But I will definitely have a look. If you can send a diagnostics report, that may also help with what is going on here.
Hope to have a fix soon!
Report id: 51f9e0b1-9c1c-443b-bcc3-a8449197fdc1
Thanks. It looks like the problem is that the EV charger creates a phantom allocation even though it is inactive. It’s a bug introduced in 2.5.1 actually, just bad timing correlating this to 2.17.1.
Should have a fix soon, but I am not sure if Homey will require certification of it or not. You may have to either lower the pri for the EV charger or run the test version. I’ll update you when I have something published.
Fix is published live now. Let me know if it works or not.
A couple of more notes here.
PELS has a starvation concept, meaning how long a device should have run, but has been denied to do so because for limits. It’s possible to create flows and such so one can take manual or automated actions if e.g a water heater hasn’t run as much as expected.
You are right that 1 A steps can make a significant instantaneous difference, particularly on three-phase charging.
For example, at 400 V three-phase:
- 6 A ≈ 4.16 kW
- 7 A ≈ 4.85 kW
- 8 A ≈ 5.54 kW
With 4 kW of other consumption and a safe limit of 9.2 kW, 7 A would give about 8.85 kW in total, while 8 A would give 9.54 kW and be too high.
However, because the tariff limit is based on energy over the clock hour, the missing 7 A step is not necessarily lost capacity. Half an hour at 6 A and half an hour at 8 A delivers the same energy as a full hour at 7 A. PELS can therefore often remain at 6 A until sufficient hourly headroom has accumulated and then increase to 8 A.
There is also an important PELS-specific detail: while another controlled device is being limited, PELS generally keeps the charger at its lowest active step. In that situation, adding 7 A would not help:
- With
6–8 A, the charger remains at 6 A. - With
6–7–8 A, it still remains at 6 A.
Once the other device has been restored, 1 A increments can make regulation smoother and let PELS use available capacity sooner. But they do not necessarily result in much more energy being charged over the complete hour. The practical benefit depends on whether the other load is uncontrolled, or another PELS-managed device that is currently being limited.
The more interesting graph therefore is not really the charger current allocated graph, but the usage graph in PELS that shows how much was consumed per hour. If there is a large gap between hourly consumption and the 9.2 kW limit, then this could indeed be interesting to look into, given that no other devices have been limited by PELS in that hour.
Hello. Great app!
I have some small questions.
I have Norgespris, source pris+spot from Glitre in NO1 area.
I set VBB (hot water boiler) to run acc to lowest price and it runs now at 12.00 because of low price. However it is not true. Having Norgespris it is cheaper between 22 and 6 because price is fixed and grid fee is almost half price at night.
Regarding Easee charger. Is throttling implemented in background? I saw that Stepped configuration allows for 6A-1ph, however when choosing 1/3-ph modes, the only option available is Turn off.
Have you thought about implementing load balancing solution?
I often see high available capacity that is not used for charging until half past an hour - is this intentional?
Hi and thanks!
Did you choose Norgespris as pricing model here:
Switching between 6A - 32A is done in the background dynamically. The “Turn off” option is only about what to do if the home goes above it’s capacity constraints.
Load balancing is sort of an overloaded term in this area. So I might have 
I’m interested in what your use case here may be.
PELS won’t start charging until there is enough room for the remaining hour. So that is probably the reason. The “Power now” in the overview tab has been a bit misleading in this area and there is a fix for that waiting for Homey’s approval now.
If you catch PELS doing something that seems off, it’s always good to send a diagnostics report together with a post here. The reports provide a fairly clear view of what is going on.
It’s been a large influx of user requests the past few weeks, and Homey has now certified a new version.
The two headline features are solar self-consumption and meter areas.
Solar self-consumption. PELS can now put excess solar power to use at home instead of exporting it. Heating devices with the new Use solar surplus option get a slightly raised target while you have surplus, simple on/off devices can be set to run on surplus only, and the Overview explains when this is happening. This also works for homes without an export meter: if your inverter is holding production back, PELS estimates the curtailed surplus and uses that. PELS also learns your panels over time and builds an hour-by-hour production forecast from your actual generation and weather data, which feeds into the cheap-hour planning. The Usage tab now shows today’s production, self-use, export, and the money saved or earned, and export (feed-in) pricing is configurable separately from your import scheme. Home batteries and inverters are recognised automatically without PELS trying to control them.
Meter areas. PELS can now manage separate parts of a property, such as an apartment, garage, or cabin, each with its own power meter, capacity limit, safety margin, and simulation setting. Devices are assigned from their Homey zones, and each area can have its own operating mode with per-area priorities and temperature targets. The Overview and Usage pages switch between areas, and capacity warnings name the area they are about. Related: when Homey Energy is your power source, you can now pick exactly which device PELS reads as the whole-home meter.
Smart tasks got several improvements too:
- Edit a task in place: change the finish time, target, or extra permissions from the task’s own page, or clear it entirely.
- A new May pause lower-priority devices permission. A task with this permission now reserves the power it needs to start, instead of turning off devices that were already idle.
Other changes worth mentioning:
- A charger that reports plugged-in but idle can now be started by PELS, so an Easee gets authenticated automatically when a task or price plan wants it to charge.
- Leave off until turned on again: turn a managed device off yourself and PELS leaves it off, using the freed power elsewhere. Turning it back on hands it straight back to normal control.
- Disable temperature control per thermostat, for devices where PELS should only switch on and off and never touch the setpoint.
Feedback is very welcome as always, especially from homes running meter areas or solar setups. Just leave a note here or send me a DM.
@Awangens so far, I have always assumed just one AMS. But it shouldn’t be too hard to support your setup properly either, I think. I just need to understand more how this looks like in Homey.
Can you go into Settings → Advanced → Log device
Then log both devices and then submit a diagnostics report. Hopefully this is enough for me to determine the gap needed to be filled to support your setup.
I have done it now. Thanks agian for the support
Did you file the diagnostics report too? I didn’t receive anything yet.
now it shall be sendt
Thanks, but I’m afraid it took too long between you hit the “log device” button and the diagnostics report button, so I didn’t receive what I was after. Could you try again?
Sorry for the inconvenience.
be178c21-78a0-4ebe-9a2e-d70b72931363
Given your setup, it’s probably best to do the arithmetic on your side and send it as a signed input through a flow. This requires some changes to how the update power flow card works, but nothing too big. I’ll update here when I have something. There is still some backlog of new features, so it will take perhaps a week or so.
The amp value is actually a fixed value now. It’s fairly benign that it tries to increase the level, but I’ll implement a feature for probing for the upper limit (cable, fuse, setting, etc) so that it PELS doesn’t unnecessarily reserves power for a step up that will never happen.
Great. Another thing I’ve noticed is that PELS tries to resume charging when charging is completed. I have not added my car into Homey yet, so that might be the reason, even though the Zaptec Homey app correctly reports charging completed when the car has reached it’s designated state of charge. This also seem to hold up other loads from resuming.
