PELS | Homey
I have published a new app that aim to keep energy usage within certain constraints based on concurrent consumption (capacity) and price.
The app is heavily inspired by the Piggy Bank app that I have been using for quite some time. That app has worked really well for me up until recently. But since it has been seemingly unmaintained for some time, and several features have stopped working for me, I decided to create a similar app. My app tries to achieve the same thing as Piggy Bank, but I’ve mostly focused on my own needs. Hope it can be useful for some of you as well.
Note that for now, it mostly controls thermostats and similars. I want to support EV chargers and such as well, but at the moment, I don’t have an EV so it’s a bit hard for me to test this.
You can find my app here: PELS | Homey
And some more docs around how to configure this app here: com.barelysufficient.pels/docs at main · olemarkus/com.barelysufficient.pels · GitHub
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I’ve been iterating on PELS quite a bit since v1.5.9, and the main user-facing addition is a new Daily Energy Budget feature. The idea is simple: in addition to keeping you under an hourly capacity cap, you can now tell PELS roughly how many kWh you want to spend per day, and it will try to plan usage across the day in a way that follows electricity prices.
This budget is intentionally a soft constraint. That means it’s used for planning and limiting, but it won’t cause “panic behavior” like emergency shedding just because you’re trending above your daily target. Capacity control is still the hard safety rail; the daily budget is more of a steering wheel.
In practical terms, this gives you a way to avoid the classic “everything runs whenever it feels like it” pattern on days where you want to be stricter. If prices are uneven, the plan will try to allocate more of the day’s energy to cheaper hours and less to expensive ones. You also get a clearer view of what PELS thinks the day will look like versus what actually happened, including remaining/deviation and an estimated cost readout in NOK. When tomorrow’s prices are available, you can preview tomorrow’s plan as well.
I also improved reliability around price totals by making nettleie (grid tariff) fetching more robust in cases where the NVE API returns empty data, so totals are less likely to disappear.
Version: 1.7.4 (released January 3, 2026). If you run into issues or have suggestions for how daily budgeting should behave, post feedback here or open an issue on GitHub.
Denne appen var egentlig enkel og grei!
Planer om å gjøre det mulig å legge til av/på enheter med strømmåling feks piller for vvb og stikkontakter? og kansje vise prisen i innsikt?
har 12 enheter men bare 3 kommer inn i app (varmekabler og en adax panelovn). har 2 vvb og 5 panelovner som hadde trivdes godt i prioritetslisten.
No plans per se. But probably not too hard to implement. Just some complexity with how to display these in the UI. Also, I have dozens of on/off devices, so the list of devices may get noisy. I’ll make a note of this though.
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The test version of the app should now work with various on/off-devices. I had to filter by class (heater, thermostat, socket and heatpump) as the app didn’t behave as expected around certain on/off devices like EV chargers.
This version will go live as soon as I get confirmation it works as intended from someone with an actual on/off device. If you are willing to test, you can find the test version here: PELS | Homey
New version live now. Two changes that are interesting:
Prices should now be more accurate, taking governmental support and tax into consideration. Typically, this means there will be fewer expensive hours in a day.
Added support for on/off-devices. Since devices like EV chargers also have the onoff capability, I had to add some filtering as the app cannot really handle more complex devices. If you have devices missing that you feel should be supported, let me know.
