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Ups. Thanks for letting me know, @Awangens.
I moved to versioned docs and these pages went in after I released the last version. Released a tiny docs-only version that restored these pages now.
A new major version is currently in test:
The headline feature is Smart tasks. You can now tell PELS that your EV should be charged to a given % by a given time, or that a room should reach a target temperature by a given time,
and PELS will plan the cheapest hours to get there while staying within your power and daily budget limits. There is a new Smart tasks tab that shows what is planned and what has
already run, and each device on the overview has a deadline pill you can tap to set or change a deadline. EV support is on by default, and PELS now learns how much power each device
actually draws so the plans get more accurate over time. There is also a new “Smart task plan changed” flow trigger.
Documentation for the test version: See docs Smart Tasks | PELS
A few other things worth pointing out:
- The daily budget got a proper Adjust view where you can drag a kWh range, preview the result side by side, see what changed, and undo if you don’t like it.
- The overview and daily budget hero are clearer about whether you are on track for the day and the reason behind each decision. If the budget you have set can’t fit the day ahead, you
are warned up front. - Device status is in plain language now — “Limited”, “Resuming”, “Charging paused”, “Lowered by PELS”, “Waiting for available power” — instead of internal planner words.
- Settings is reorganised: separate pages for Electricity prices and Price-aware devices, and the Usage screen now clearly separates Power now, Safe pace now and Hard cap.
- Cached prices and smart task plans survive app restarts and the change of day more reliably, transient Homey API hiccups are retried automatically, and a number of smaller display and stability issues have been fixed.
Feedback from people running the test version is very welcome before this goes live.
All this work is now live. This means EV is “first class citizen” as well and I have resolved the EV github issue. Let me know if further work is needed or anything is missing.
New version just went live! Trigger card for when prices are updated + price data as JSON in a global token.
Hi @Ole_Markus_With : Would you please add a flow card to set this setting? I have 1 car that charges with 1 phase, and another that charges with 3 phases…
Yes. That is certainly doable.
@arovik This is now available on testing. Will be released live as soon as Homey reviewers certify the release.
nice! thanks!
New version live:
I’ve started surfacing some of PELS’s most-used bits as Homey widgets, so you can get to them straight from your dashboard/home tab instead of always opening the settings UI.
There are two new widgets in this release.
The first lets you create a smart task directly from a widget. As you set it up it shows you the plan and a cost preview, with a little budget chart so you can see when the work will actually run and roughly what it’ll cost before you commit. There’s also an opt-in “Extra permissions” toggle for when you want a task to push a bit harder than usual.
The second shows which devices PELS is currently holding back, and lets you rescue any of them in one tap. What you see in the preview is exactly what gets applied. A rescue also lets the device step up by shedding lower-priority devices to make room, on top of lifting today’s budget — within the physical capacity limit, of course.
A few other things in this release:
- Smart tasks now switch their device off cleanly once they’re done.
- Høiax water heaters use native stepped control by default now, and devices will warn you if one of your flows conflicts with PELS control.
There’s more on all the widgets here: Dashboard Widgets | PELS — and the smart task docs are at Smart Tasks | PELS if you want the details.
I am thinking these two widgets are really just a start. My plan is to surface more of PELS through widgets over time, so PELS feels generally more integrated into the Homey app.
I have my own wishlist of widgets I’d like to add, but if you have any input, anything you frequently go into the settings UI to do, I’d like to know so I can see if we can turn those operations into widgets.
@Awangens Thanks for reporting this. What I can imagine happened here is PELS wanting to use 10A, but the charger only offered 9A back. There is an easy fix if that is the case. But you said you had to take manual action? Was that manual action to have the charger to step up and consume more power? Or did you have to take manual action to consume less power?
I will look further into this. What I did was this: (but I am not sure if it actually used that extra loop)
The charging has worked well this night.
It would be nice if the steps were per amp from 5 to 10 were incremented by 1 Amp (5,6,7,8,9,10)
Below 5 amps, my charger does not charge and goes into pause mode.
Based on these, it seems like the charger is always returning the expected amount of A back to PELS. If you see the charger sending reporting something like 9A back to PELS on its own again, a diagnostics report could be interesting. But we may have to be lucky if it caught the problem since the diagnostics report has a fairly short timespan.
I did 2A steps to reduce churn and avoiding the charger having to jump too much between steps. It could certainly be changed, but there is a tradeoff here. And at least in my head, I figured 1A steps wouldn’t influence actual charge time too much. The EV control modes have 6A as the lowest step.
Whats the tradeoff?
A charger should be able to handle those changes easily. (I checked woth the aupplier of my charger and they replied that even shutting on/of a lot should not be an issue. The relais are build for it.
So an individual charger would probably not have a problem with it. At least most docs I have seen have “safe” APIs for changing current.
But the whole-home system theoretically wants a stable system as possible. Fewer transitions means less chance of overshooting and such. This is particularly true with chargers and other devices that tend to use cloud intermediaries. They are fairly slow, and can take even minutes from initiating actuation to materialised power draw. And fine-granular control would naturally fit closer to the whole-home power usage ceiling.
That being said, PELS does a lot to try to reserve capacity before usage materialise and such, so it may not being such a big problem. But still I am not sure if every step gives that much value, hence tradeoff.
But it is fairly easy to change step layout for chargers, so current layout is problematic, let me know.
All the features requested by me and by users who have shared feedback so far have now been implemented.
The feature train will probably slow down a bit from here, but I am still very open to new ideas, requests, and other feedback. If you are using PELS, just leave a note here or send me a DM.
