[HOW-TO][Pro] Charge your EV to a battery target by a deadline, with PELS

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There are two ways to think about charging an EV overnight:

“Run the charger for five cheap hours” or “have the car at 60% by 07:00”.

A fixed block of cheap hours rarely hits the mark. It’s working blind: it runs for the hours you booked, wherever that happens to leave the battery. It can’t tell when the car needs more energy than you guessed (a colder night, or it came home emptier than usual), or when charging is running slower because something else in the house is drawing power. So it tends to either overshoot toward 100%, which is harder on the battery, or quietly run short, and you don’t find out until the morning.

State of charge is what removes the blindfold. It lets you charge to a set level like 60% and stop, using only the energy you actually need, and it’s the one signal that shows whether charging is on track to hit the target in time.

Homey describes the goal well: a car that’s ready when you need it, rather than charging flat out the moment you plug in. Homey calls this smart charging, and this guide is how to actually do it in PELS, where you set it up as a Smart task. The focus is charging to a deadline, which is where the term deadline charging comes from: you give it a target battery level and a ready-by time, like 60% by 07:00, and it plans backwards. It picks useful hours before the deadline, prefers the cheaper ones, keeps everything under your power cap, and watches the car’s actual state of charge, replanning if charging isn’t keeping up. (If a fixed block of cheap hours is all you need, there’s a section near the end on that.)

First, what PELS actually is

If you’ve not used PELS before: it’s a community app for Homey Pro that keeps your home’s electricity use sensible in two ways. It stops the whole house from drawing too much power at once (your capacity cap, also called the hard cap), and it shifts flexible loads like water heaters, heating and EV charging toward cheaper hours, when hourly electricity prices are low. You install it from the Homey App Store.

Three things are worth knowing first:

• The hard cap: the most power you want the whole house pulling at once, to stay under a capacity-tariff step or just to avoid tripping the main fuse. PELS works to keep total usage below it.
• PELS controls a device in one of two ways, and this distinction matters later:
  • Capacity / power-limit control: the “caps” feature. PELS lets the device run whenever there’s spare power under the cap, and trims it back as you get close. It reacts to how much room there is right now, not to price or time of day.
  • A Smart task: PELS plans ahead. You give it a goal (e.g. a battery target by a time), and it chooses specific hours to run the device, prefers the cheap ones, and deliberately leaves it off the rest of the time.
• State of charge (SoC): the car’s battery percentage, which is what makes a deadline meaningful. More on this next.

This guide uses a Smart task for the car. Keep the two-mode distinction in mind. It’s the reason behind one setting in Step 1. If you want the bigger picture of how PELS’s cost-saving features relate, there’s a Compare Cost-Saving Functions page.

A note on “SoC”

SoC is just the battery percentage Homey gets from your car or charger. It’s what lets PELS tell whether charging is actually moving toward the target instead of guessing. None of the setup is hard, but where that reading comes from depends on your car or charger, so Step 2 is mostly about working out which case is yours.

Deadline charging vs. booking cheap hours

Booking a number of cheap hours is simpler, and it’s a perfectly good approach. The two just optimise for different things:

Booking a fixed number of cheap hours	Deadline charging with SoC
You pick the hours	You pick the battery target and ready-by time; PELS picks the hours
Runs for the hours you booked, wherever that leaves the battery	Charges to your target (e.g. 60%) and stops
Optimises for cheap hours	Optimises for readiness, using cheap hours where they fit
You adjust it yourself if conditions change (cold weather, half-empty battery)	PELS tracks progress and replans when its estimate changes
Simple, fully under your control, no battery reading needed	Needs a battery-percentage source, but runs more hands-off
Hard cap handled separately by capacity control	The same task respects your hard cap and device priorities

The capacity-cap part matters most if your grid tariff has a demand or capacity component, which is increasingly common across Europe and elsewhere. A single high peak can push you into a more expensive tariff step for the whole month, and PELS keeps the charging session under the cap the entire time, deadline or not. (Local specifics vary. If you’re in Norway, there’s a dedicated For norske hjem page on the price and tariff details.)

What you’ll build

By the end you’ll have set up:

1. EV charger current control, so PELS can pause, resume, or lower charging through Homey.
2. Battery-percentage reporting, so PELS knows the car’s SoC.
3. A Homey dashboard with the PELS widgets for creating and watching the task.
4. A first charging task, e.g. charge the EV to 60% by 07:00.
5. (Optional) automation that re-creates the task whenever the car is plugged in.

Before you begin

If you’ve only just installed PELS, get the basics working first. The deadline feature builds on them. PELS needs three things before it can do anything useful:

1. A live whole-home power reading (e.g. from a smart-meter reader like P1 or HAN, or via Homey Energy), so it knows your current usage.
2. Your hard cap set, so it knows the limit to stay under.
3. A price source, so it can prefer cheap hours.

The Getting Started guide walks through all three click by click. If your power and prices come from Homey Energy, Using Homey Energy is the shorter route. Helpful background on the Homey side: Homey Energy and Understanding the Homey Energy tab.

Then, specifically for this guide, you’ll also want:

• An EV charger paired in Homey.
• A way to set the charger’s available current, either a charger-app feature or a Flow action.
• A source of the car’s battery percentage in Homey, from the car or the charger. Step 2 covers this, and it’s the part that varies most between setups.

A charging task can sit at Building plan… until prices are available for the whole ready-by window, so if you’re setting this up in the afternoon before tomorrow’s prices publish, that’s expected.

Step 1: Connect the charger to PELS

Give PELS control of the charging current first.

1. Open Apps → PELS → Settings → Devices.
2. Open your EV charger.
3. Enable Managed by PELS.
4. Choose EV 1-phase or EV 3-phase to match your charger.
5. Create the current-control Flow described in Configure an EV Charger.

On a Zaptec? There’s a shorter path: Zaptec EV Charger.

The one setting to get right: turn power-limit control off

When you open the charger you’ll see a Power-limit control toggle. With a Smart task, turn it off and let the task do the driving. This one is worth understanding rather than just copying, because it’s where the two control modes from earlier collide.

A Smart task deliberately decides not to charge in certain hours, say the expensive early-evening block. But power-limit control doesn’t know about that plan. It only looks at whether there’s spare power under your cap. So if you leave it on, it will happily start the charger in exactly those hours the moment the house has room. You’d end up charging smeared across the hours the plan wanted empty (usually the pricier ones), which is the whole thing you were trying to avoid.

So the rule is simple: don’t drive the same device with both the caps feature and a Smart task. Pick one per device. For a Smart task that means:

• Managed by PELS: on
• Power-limit control: off
• The Smart task makes the charger available during its planned hours, and still keeps it under the hard cap while it runs.

Step 2: Give PELS the battery percentage

More often the percentage lives on the car device, not the charger. To update the state of charge, send the car’s value to the PELS charger entry with a Flow:

Flow part	Card
When	Your car app: battery level changed
Then	PELS: Report battery level for charger

In the PELS action card, pick the same charger you use for current control, and drop the car app’s battery-percentage tag into Battery level (%).

Step 3: Add the dashboard widgets

Dashboards let you run this without opening PELS settings for every task. (Homey’s guide: Create and manage Homey Dashboards.)

Make an EV charging dashboard and add:

Widget	Use it for
New smart task	Create the charging task from the dashboard
Smart tasks	See the EV task’s status at a glance: Scheduled, On track, At risk, Cannot finish, or Unplugged. Step 5 explains each
Available power	Check how close the home is to the hard cap right now
Budget and Price	Today’s energy budget (PELS’s optional soft daily kWh target), the price shape, and whether the day is tracking to plan
Held-back devices	(Optional) see what’s waiting and why. You can tap Let it run now for a budget-held device. Capacity-held ones stay locked, since the hard cap is physical

Put New smart task right next to Smart tasks: one creates the task, the other tells you whether it’s still healthy.

Step 4: Create the charging task

From the New smart task widget:

1. Pick the EV charger.
2. Set the target, e.g. 60%.
3. Set Ready by, e.g. 07:00.
4. Preview the plan. You’ll see the hours PELS would pick, an estimated cost, and a price curve with those hours highlighted.
5. Confirm.

Let’s say you’re comfortable charging to 60% day to day. Charging to a set level rather than 100% is easier on the battery, and PELS charges to whatever you set and stops there.

Leave Extra permissions off for the first run. That optional section lets a task go over today’s budget or limit lower-priority devices to make its deadline (both still stay under the hard cap), but a normal deadline should prove itself inside your budget first. After you confirm, the task appears in the Smart tasks widget and on the PELS Smart tasks page.

Step 5: Read the result

Check the widgets in this order:

What you see	What it means
Scheduled	PELS has picked future charging hours. Nothing to do.
On track	Progressing as expected. The detail may say Charging now during an active hour.
Unplugged	The task is paused because the car is unplugged or the session ended. Plug it back in if the deadline still matters.
At risk	Still possibly reachable, but time or available power is getting tight.
Cannot finish	PELS doesn’t currently see enough usable charging before the ready-by time.

Each row also shows the battery level moving toward the target (e.g. 42% → 60%) and the Ready by time. When the car reaches the target, the task is marked Satisfied and drops off the widget. That’s success, not a problem.

One thing worth knowing: cheap hours are preferred, but readiness comes first. If the car needs energy soon, PELS will take a normal or even expensive hour rather than miss the deadline. That’s the whole point of a deadline. You only pay for a pricier hour when the alternative is an unready car in the morning.

The Smart tasks widget ranks active tasks by how much attention they need and colour-codes each status chip — here the spread from Cannot finish through At risk to Building plan… — then lists Recently ended tasks as Succeeded or Missed. Your healthy EV task will sit as Scheduled or On track.

Tap a task to open its trajectory. The chart plots the planned climb to your target against the car’s measured state of charge, so you can see at a glance whether charging is keeping pace: the two lines sitting together is on track, while the measured line drifting below the plan is what tips a task to At risk. Underneath, an estimate shows the rough time, power, and energy still to go. (The PELS Smart tasks page shows the same trajectory with more context — the hours it picked, the price shape, and background usage. If you like knowing exactly what each status means under the hood, there’s a Plan States reference.)

Tap a task to see its trajectory: planned vs measured state of charge against the target, with the time / power / energy estimate.

Step 6: (Optional) Make it automatic

Once the first run behaves, you can have PELS create the task automatically whenever you plug in, instead of using the widget:

Flow part	Card
When	Your car or charger app: car plugged in
Then	PELS: Add charging task

Use the same target and ready-by time you tested in the widget. Keep the battery-reporting Flow from Step 2 running. The task is only ever as good as the SoC PELS receives.

What if my car can’t report its battery level?

Then there’s no state of charge to track, and the better tool is Book Cheap Hours With Flows. You pick a number of cheap hours before a departure time, and PELS makes the charger available during them while still holding the cap. It won’t charge to a target or know how full the car is, but it gets you cheap, capacity-safe charging without an SoC source. The same approach fits if you’d rather keep the whole schedule in plain Flow logic.

More detail

• Getting Started · Compare Cost-Saving Functions · Smart Tasks · Daily Energy Budget
• Configure an EV Charger · Zaptec EV Charger
• Dashboard Widgets · Using Homey Energy · Plan States
• EV charging under a power limit · Book Cheap Hours With Flows
• The full deadline-charging reference: Deadline Charging With SoC
• The app: PELS on the Homey App Store