@All,
Due to some people experiencing problems, I have disabled two one of the new features again in version 0.20.15:
The feature that limits power in case of bad meter readers.
Using energy readings as additional input to the power input for energy estimation.
IMPORTANT:
In case you did NOT experience any trouble with the previous version, then you really should manually ENABLE the new power limiting feature for your safety. It WILL save you from overshooting the power tariff when the meter reader has a bad connection with homey.
In case you DID experience trouble with the previous version, then please get in touch so I can figure out the appropriate actions should be going forward.
I will NOT enable this feature again but I will probably make it default on again (for new users only) later when I have more input.
Edit: I added some fixes to the part below, so I decided not to disable it after all, it should be safe:
Less important:
Using the energy reading as additional input to improve the accuracy of the app has shown to be problematic for some users with Tibber Pulse because it will occasionally report Power from the past. Now, I do not have any input from anyone if this was because they were supplying power values to the app with flow cards in addition to the direct power readings (user error) or if it is the Tibber Pulse itself that reported power readings out of order / not in synch with the meter reader. Thus I will just revert to the old behavior (Power input only) until someone with Tibber Pulse volunteer to do some testing. The energy reading should significantly improve the accuracy of the app so I intend to enable this again soon when the issue has been properly understood, but I need a volunteer that owns a Tibber Pulse.
A lot of you may be starting to switch AC devices from heating to cooling these days. I recently added support for other AC modes to the app but this is only an infant feature so you may want to be aware of the following until the feature is mature:
The feature does invert the temperature deltas for all price points to ensure that you still save money on fluctuating prices when you go to cooling. The interface currently gives little feedback about this so it might seem a bit counterintuitive at the current moment as delta temperatures now can only be + for cheap and - for expensive.
The only way to change AC mode during the day is by leaving the Piggy AC mode as âUnchangedâ and then changing the actual mode by using external flows. This will be possible within the app later by using the time schedules.
The mode temperature is left unchanged as of now, which means that you should be VERY CAREFUL with just changing from heating to cooling and leaving the mode temperatures as they are. If you donât and previously had your home set to lower temperatures at night you should be damn sure that the app will ensure that the temperature is forced down at night as fast as possible so you wake up in an ice-cold house. So either you must change the night temperature setting or you should have an external flow changing the AC mode to heating at night.
This will be easier once time schedules are properly implemented. Until then - some nerd time may be required.
There was a critical bug that forced all Belgian users over to the Norwegian cost Schema after saving the settings two times. This would render the app useless, sorry about that. This has been fixed in version 0.20.18 which is currently under testing.
I keep getting requests about adding Tesla support. Please understand that I Would LOVE to do this⌠however the Tesla APP does not allow 3rd party apps to control it. I requested a change but never got a reply after this forum post, So⌠if you REALLY want Tesla support within this app then Please visit that forum and add your pledge yourself. The more of you that request it the likelier it is that he will make the request come true.
If not, youâre stuck with using the flows to control it. This app allows you to control the tesla charger this way too, however, nobody has reported back to me how well it works for a Tesla charger so I cannot say for sure that the feature is optimal or if it needs improvements.
Easter is ended, and finaly had some time testing on Easee charging.
Not able to recreate the actual issue above, however, testing with a lower Max Hourly Consumption 2-5kWh that I should see PB start to limit more often. gives
In Debug Logg:
+3:26:19.031: Failed signalling charger: Error: Timeout after 5000ms
+3:32:47.435: Failed signalling charger: Error: Timeout after 5000ms
+3:46:26.057: Failed signalling charger: Error: Timeout after 5000ms
On Easse Log, it says it is charging and turned off quite a lot, Typical it is starting charging 5mins after turned off.
(minimum toggle time is set to 300s).
Not sure how to test things here in a structured way, as there are so many different parameters involved.
Limit, numbers of kWh to charge, other consumers, flows etc.
This only prints if the Easee app does not respond. There could be various reasons for that but itâs completely out of my control. Most likely this happens when Homey is very busy/overloaded.
Yeah, you set the minimum toggle time to 300s so that is exactly 5 minutes, so this seems logical.
5 minutes of toggle time may be a bit too much; I would find it odd if the response time of the Easee charger exceeds 120 sec. all the time.
When the power budget is of sufficient size, the charger should not turn off but instead stabilize on a lower charging current. However if you use a budget of 2-5 kWh then, depending on the usage in the rest of the house, it may not be much energy left to power the car. Thus you would more often see the charging being turned offâŚ
Following this path, - found that Easee APP also shows some log entry for the last issue, seems that it has some issues talking with the API changing current, but not yet confirmed.
Agree, just for testing to see actuall actions. Changed it down to 90s (seems like the lowest allowed?) and see no differense other than it is faster adjusting current.
The low 2-5kWh is just for testing and find the alarm in shorter periodes to be able to track it âliveâ. No intention to stay here at a regular basis.
I have moved back a step and started investigating the Energy Reading Config (still using Pulse). It seems that playing with âReserved Powerâ has done some magic, charger uses less current in the first half hour, and speeds up towards the end of the hour if there is free Wh available. Will tuning âTime Window smoothingâ do the same for the 5 first minutes of an hour âlimitâ alerts ? Test in progressâŚ
I probably can create a flow to collect some average numbers for W usage and use the FlowCard to set Reserved Power dynamically. If PB tracks W usage for devices it controlles it might be unnecessary to do it manually and propose it as a nice feature for a future verison?
The time window smoothing will increase the available power at the start of the power yes, so you donât get those abrupt power offs when a new hour starts.
Increasing the reserved power give you more upswing at the end, so they are kind of counterweights.
If you want less on/offâs you should probably use the âStart thresholdâ instead of reserved power because that will wait with the charging until there is sufficiently free power to charge.
To be honest I never really use this myself, I have it set to statically 500 W. I have enough heaters around the house to turn off so I am always able to free up sufficient power anyway. But I donât see a reason to reserve anything for charging because that is a controllable current. The feature to reserve energy is to make sure you have enough energy to use for devices that cannot be controlled like when you make dinner.
PB already tracks the W for charging. The history is kept as well but I havenât made graphs for it yet.
Anyway, not sure what you were really proposing⌠if it is about adjusting reserved power based on what is being used then I donât see the point because the feature is for devices that cannot be controlled, not for controllable devices.
Many roads to Rome i Guess. The proposed thing was to remove Fuzz for users by letting system âhelpâ for best setting. As an Automation Engineer I always look for possible places to remove manuall entries on data we already got.
-With charger turned off, - TotalUsage-ControlledW = Reserved - Close to correct if you take an average for X hours/days. One setting that might be hidden/optional for User to think about during first setup or later for a device change. Eg. going from uncontrolled to controlled. Might have different Reserverations for night/day, but probably not important, and you can adjust it from flow anyway if needed.
I liked the Charging start Slow, and Increase method as this results in alot less Active Limit flags and very few of the complete stop of charging for X minutes at random times. Current adjustments seems to works better. Every time charger does a stop/start, EV also does some work updating its status, awaking from sleep. (Audi seems to reboot their MMI aswell).
With several Thermostats that is built to turn on/off a relay I see the power reserves you have to play with does not need the reservation. I have currently 2 x AC that from Mars now typicaly warms the whole house using 3-500W total, making all the floor thermostats stay in Idle close to Next winter again. So there are little âPowerâ reserves from heating to adjust, and ACs typicaly like to stay on, with as little fliping as possible. Temperature adjustment is also slow to give any W effect.
Reserved Watt was nice to tell the System about the average W for unmnaged devices like refrigerator (and deicing) ,waterheater, watercooler, fans, network, etc. that tends to use idle 300W, but during deicing up to 2kW
So with a Limit set to 5kWh , and 400W usage at the start of the hour. Easee fires off with 4500W, to fill the 5kWh available. Suddently compressor starts on refrigerator, or it starts to deice. , Easee has to reduce current, until it power off - because adjusting AC gives close to no effect.
Alterative way - Limit 5kWh, and 400W usage + 1500 Reserved, Easee starts with 3000W, and then compressor starts or water heater is on for a few minutes it just continues to charge and AC is untouched. As we get closer to the end of hour it can increasee the Charge current as we have some leftâŚ
Where the app will try to adjust the ControlledW such that
TotalUsage + Reserved <= AvailablePower
Reserved is for future power usage within the same hour, not for current power usage.
If you want to relate it to UncontrolledW it would be something like this
I wonder if what youâre proposing is to track ControlledW so you can calculate the UncontrolledW(now) in the calculation above, but this will only allow you to calculate what âcan be reserved nowâ, not what should actually be reserved for future use. The intent with the reserved power is to make sure you can start making dinner at the end of the hour where there is less flexibility to turn off things than there was at the beginning of the hour, so the input to this value is dependent on something the user knows and not something that can be determined from the system, which is why I am not following your line of thoughts.
Iâm puzzled, the app support two kinds of charging but I didnât think you had that one available:
Charging for unsupported chargers must use the flows- This will increase/decrease the charging in steps, starting from the lowest amp.
Charging for supported chargers always start charging with a designated start current, by default this is 11 Amps because Easee chargers need to start on 11 Amps to ensure 3-phase charging will work. Then, after that the app is reading how much W is used in relation to the offered Amps and calculates exactly how many Amps to offer for the rest of the hour to stay within the Power budget, this calculation is done at intervals closely related to the configured toggle rate. (yes, charging can go below 11A after the initialization, itâs just the way Easee made it work for 3-phase chargers, donât ask me whyâŚ)
I understand the Intent of it, and it works great as it is, but we can fine tune values a bit automaticaly.
That I am talking about is, not Controlled and UnControlled devices from a PB perspective.
Devices UnControlled in PB can be defined as controlled and uncontrolled from a Homey or user perspective.
Typical Refigirator is that I would say is Always ON , Uncontrolled by user or homey. Example my Whirlpool has typical for an hour: 5 min, 10W - 30 min 100W, 20 Min 800 w - 5 min 1800W - âsnapshotting numbersâ without a proper âreserved valueâ would most likely put you into Limit issue during the hour. For a Large house you might have several of those kind of appliances like water boiler, several refrigators, outside lights, etc that follow the same pattern hour by hour, day by day. So that is why I mentioned maybee you can have something like reserved for day/night periodes aswell.
In your case, turning on a oven for dinner . That is a controlled device, not from PB side but from a user/homey side. And a flow attached to either hour,device watt, or wathever user decides to be a trigger to âreserveâ is possible with todays solution.
I use Easee charger - Not sure if 1-phase uses same numbers as 3-phase?. Override in PB is disabled, but shows Min and Start as 7A -? Start Threshold default, 2000W. - On the Charger itself it is set to with max 32AâŚ
I have a Flow today that retrieves the % battery from my car then it receives an battery update⌠Uses the Flow, Charge for X numbers of kWh until Time . PB populates the hour and shows correct hours in the graph based on pricing perfectly and it seems to work.
Ok, I understand. It sounds like something could be done to track this, but it will drastically increase the cpu-usage of the app, so Iâm not sure if the older Homeys will be able to do that every 10 sec. Currently the app does not attempt to look at/adjust every device every 10 sec, it just start looking at devices and attempts to change the first device it find that need a change and aborts after that. Though the cpu-usage graph seem to be quite low so I suppose my worries may be misplaced.
I may try to improve around this area, but I guess it will be a bit into the future as there are many other improvement requests queued up.
PB doesnât know because the Easee app doesnât expose this to other apps.
If you donât have override enabled the default values are used:
startCurrent: 11,
minCurrent: 7,
pauseCurrent: 4,
Great , now lets hope Easee survives their ongoing hiccups as I used quite a lot of time to adapt the system to their charger
It is now possible to use temperature min/max to control power tariff instead of on/off - this can be enabled by going to âControllable devicesâ and setting âAllow temperature controlâ to âPreferredâ. It is enabled by default for new users, but old users must enable this manually. Note that this will no longer turn the devices on again, only control temperature, so if they are already turned off when you enable the feature then you need to manually turn on those devices. (which is why old users have to enable this manually)
Bug fixes:
Altherma III Geo pump control should now be synched with the updated Altherma driver.
Fixed an issue where a few heat pumps that didnât set the temperature correctly when in cooling mode.
New devices:
Added support for no.connecte:thermostat_pm thermostat
Do i need to use a flow card to update the effect, or is it enough choosing âpulseâ in the settings menu?
And when should i use the update energy card instead of the update power card?
If your meter reader is found by the app it is sufficient that it is selected in the settings menu. In fact, it is much better because then the app will get the exact timestamp for all the changes to the meter readings, which will improve the accuracy. (flow cards donât pass on the original timestamps)
You only need to use the flow cards if your meter reader is not supported, and the app happily accepts both the energy card and power card on top of each other, so both can be used or one can be used, itâs up to you - the only requirement is that it needs a report as often as possible (around every 10 sec.)
I would start by looking at the app settings. The Hourly max graph should help you pinpoint which day the incorrect reading is from. First look at the monthly view to see the day, then enter the daily view and browse to the day in question. Then you will be able to see which hour had the discrepancy. If you click this hour you can see some details about that hour. For example, as shown in the figure below I had a bad connection with the meter read on March 31 around 13:00.
This means that what will be displayed in the app as the estimated tariff may not be correct. If this is a typical case for your meter reader then you should probably try to improve the connection with Homey to increase the reliability. Otherwise, the app has a limiter you can enable in order to try to meet the power tariff even when the connection is bad. However, the best option is always to improve the connectivity. If you on the other hand had a good connection then please let me know and I can look more into it.
The user interface for time schedules is nearing completion now so I will rip out a lot of the old menu options soon as they can all be set with this new all-in-one thermostat.
Please have a look and tell me if you like it or have improvement suggestions. It can be found under the Advanced Setup menu â Time Schedules. (only applicable for test version 0.20.22, the stable version does not have this)
One note about the combined heating/cooling. There is a proposal for a new AC mode called âSmartâ that will keep the AC in heating mode until the temperature goes above what is defined as the temperature for the ânormalâ price point for cooling, then it will stay in cooling mode until it drops below what is defined as the temperature for the ânormalâ price point for heating before it switches back. This will allow you to give it some distance between when it will switch so it doesnât switch unnecessarily.
Yes it looks like it didnt have enough data that particular hour. But how can i optimize the connection with Tibber pulse. And can i setup a warning notifitication whenever the connection is lost?
edit: but this does not seem right at all. How is this calculated? My tariff settings is at 5-10 KW
It seems to be using WiFi, so keeping both Homey and the pulse reader close to a wifi router / mesh will probably improve the situation.
There is no such alarm currently but I have an intention to add one.
However, for the time being, if you enable the âmax powerlessâ limiter that will safety-guard you from such loss of signals, you will get an alarm whenever the limiter starts to cut off power due to a missing signal.
This is expected at the end of every hour where you had little usage. Imagine if you are at the 10kWh tariff, then if you did not use any energy at all for the first 30 minutes then you can stay at 20kW for the rest of the hour and still be within the 10kWh limit.
may be required.
This has been fixed in version 
, now lets hope Easee survives their ongoing hiccups as I used quite a lot of time to adapt the system to their charger 
