Zaptec app for Homey?

Yes they should match exactly :slight_smile:

So, I did another testing round. This time, I tested almost all of the Flow Cards available. Frankly speeking, I didn’t test the “current voltage and ampere” related Cards.

The charging status seems to work as expected, even the “charging finished” status works the same as the Zaptec App works. No findings here so far.

Following If-Flow Cards are not working:

  • Car Connects
  • Car disconnects
  • Charging starts
  • Charging stop

I’m still fascinated how good the power balancing is working! Knowing, that the car cannot start charging before the current Ampere is higher than 5 Ampere, you can work a lot of automation alone with this feature itself, because you can even decide, between charging or not AND the amount of power. This is very useful.

@rh_rh - Do you know if you can set the current ampere individual if you have 2 chargers? By that you could potential have the possibility to force one car to have all the 3x16A they share together.

The use-case is that I want to prioritize my wife’s car before mine and by that earn some points :kissing_heart:

Hi @Magnus_P

First of all: Happy wife, happy life! :slight_smile:

Do you have Zaptec go oder Zaptec Pro boxes? If I remember right, Zaptec offers an integrated dynamic “overall” loadbalancing, that makes sure, that you never go higher than 16A oder 32A (depending on your house installation) on your over all house installation. But this servie is not available for “go” boxes as far as I understood my Zaptec Dealer. They are thinking to offer this in the future. What ever this means.

How are your 2 wallboxes configured right now? Are they both allowed to charge with 3x16A? or how do you handle this today? This should be visible at your Zaptec Webportal.

As you can see, my box is limited (this is a physical switch in the hardware) to 16A What ever i would set manually with the loadbalancing toolset, it never goes higher than 16 A. How is this setting on your 2 installations?

If both boxes are allowed to be set to 16A you theoretically can now build your own "overall loadbalancing with Homey: You should be able to set each wallbox it’s own values. If you build flows, that sets one box to a lower Ampere Output and the other one to a higher Ampere Output you will have the same effect as Zaptec “Pro” would do. BUT: You have to be carefull with that, If one flow fails or if you don’t have enough time buffer in between, your house will be dark :wink: I would be careful with that.

Hope I addressed your question with this?

Is it possible to have flow card that disable and enable Eco mode?

When Eco mode is active, I can’t find a flow cards that’s capable of starting the charging process. There is support for this in Zaptec’s own app for mobile phones.

“Start charging” only works if Eco mode is disabled.

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I have never heard about an Eco mode before. What does this mode and how can you activate/deactivate it? Do you have a Zaptec go?

Edit: Ah, Google knows about… Nice feature! This isn’t available here in Switzerland. @pwad Is this part of the API?

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Eco mode can be activated, deactivated or changed via the web portal and the mobile app. You can also override it if needed.

The article you linked describes Eco mode in a good way.

I also have a 3rd party solution connected to the powermeter HAN port to control the available power to the Zaptec Go, so the main fuse isn’t overloaded, but that’s off topic here.

I can see a lot of readable eco mode values in the API. But I see no clear way of updating the settings for an installation. My suspicion is that it’s just undocumented.

I’m moving houses today, so the computer is in a box for moment. I’ll try to investigate it later.

For clarity, I can see enabled and available features, where ecomode is one of them. I can also see ecomode properties departure time, min charge and delivery area (Nord pool region). So I’m pretty sure they should be changeable as well. But the API only documents essentially only the available current in the update request.

Edit: regarding third part power meters. I still think it might be fairly interesting to integrate since then you could use zaptecs more sophisticated algorithm for avoiding circuit overload and not consider changing available current to often (every time it renegotiates with the car).

Zaptec Sense for avoiding circuit overload is not very good at the moment. I’ve tested ut, but swapped to Tibber (Norwegian company) for this task. Tibber’s algorithms are very good for this.

Eco mode is just used to charge during the cheapest hours of the day before a given time of departure. This feature works well.

It’s no hurry to find a solution to Eco mode. It would be nice to use a smart button in Homey restarting/overriding the charging process when in Eco mode if needed.

It seems, that the refreshing of the values is still not that reliable. I did a 22.5 kWh charge tonight. (see Zaptec printscreen) The Homey app stopped refreshing the values at 16.47 kWh and has not recognized, that the charging is done. It has not changed to Charging is finished and all values showing an ongoing charging. I had to disconnect the car until it refreshed the value.

I had a short power failure this night where the Homey was restarted, after that the Zaptec app was not operational. I will make new tests to verify the behavior to power toggle the Homey.

I have seen this a couple of times where the app is un-operational and might be addressed to a re-connection strategy @pwad ?

After restarting the app manually solves the problem!

image

I think I found the issue for both your problems. Please run the latest version (1.1.5) for a few days!

I’ll try to look into the quicker AMQP (streaming) connectivity :slight_smile:

If card start charging and stop charging are not working as far as i see. Is my understanding correct. “start” fires when status changes to “charging” and stop fires when status becomes “charging finished”? Or is it, when you start and stop charging manually?

Status update and charging status works great!

@pwad I would like to test the load balancing a little bit deeper. May I ask you to bring back the functionality to set each phase seperatly (than cards) ? I guess, I gave you a wrong information that you have to set all of them to the same level. I d like to test this. Would be great! Once it’s back, i will provide the correct handling informations. Sorry for that.

@pwad

I asked Zaptec how exactly the control of the 3 phases behaves. My statement that all 3 phases must be switched simultaneously was incorrect. Correct is: For the car to use one phase, it needs over 5 amps each. If a phase drops below this value, it can no longer be used by the car. So as long as the car supports 1, 2, 3 - phase charging, a separate control can definitely provide a finely graduated charge, which is very important for photovoltaics.

For this reason, I ask you to integrate the load balancing again for each phase separately as a then-card.

Edit: Zaptec go boxes cannot switch from 3-phase charging to 1-phase charging because their internal relais cannot switch each phase seperatly technically wise. There is a technical revision announced Q4/ 2023 with a new relais. A possible workaround might be if you turn off Phase 2 and/or Phase 3 with an external relais, but this is not really fancy. Never turn off Phase 1 with an external relais, Phase 1 powers the Wallbox itself.

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I restored the current per phase on the set available current card. I also added a little debug log for the state change which should trigger start stop charging. If it’s possible, can you paste the debug log (visible in device settings) here about a minute or two after you’ve started a charging session?

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@pwad Cool! As soon I receive an update, I will run a few tests.

I have loads of these (in the debug log):

[2023-03-20T13:15:00.407Z] Failed to handle charger state: SyntaxError: Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0
[2023-03-20T13:15:00.410Z] Updated charger state
[2023-03-20T13:15:30.585Z] Failed to handle charger state: SyntaxError: Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0
[2023-03-20T13:15:30.588Z] Updated charger state
[2023-03-20T13:16:00.684Z] Failed to handle charger state: SyntaxError: Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0
[2023-03-20T13:16:00.687Z] Updated charger state
[2023-03-20T13:16:30.930Z] Failed to handle charger state: SyntaxError: Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0
[2023-03-20T13:16:30.934Z] Updated charger state
[2023-03-20T13:17:01.079Z] Failed to handle charger state: SyntaxError: Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0
[2023-03-20T13:17:01.084Z] Updated charger state
[2023-03-20T13:17:31.276Z] Failed to handle charger state: SyntaxError: Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0
[2023-03-20T13:17:31.280Z] Updated charger state

(There are many more that are identical)

@pwad

[2023-03-20T20:39:31.170Z] Charge mode update: 5 to 3
[2023-03-20T20:39:31.171Z] Failed to handle charger state: Error: Could not trigger Flow card with id “charging_starts”: Invalid value for token car_connected. Expected boolean but got object
[2023-03-20T20:39:31.176Z] Updated charger state
[2023-03-20T20:40:00.270Z] Updated charger state
[2023-03-20T20:40:01.889Z] Updated available current
[2023-03-20T20:40:30.477Z] Updated charger state
[2023-03-20T20:41:00.755Z] Updated charger state
[2023-03-20T20:41:30.785Z] Updated

I’ve improved logging a bit and added a quickfix for the failing if-cards. Let’s see if we get further this time. Please continue pasting the debug log when the messages change :slight_smile:

I have many of these on one of my 3 chargers:
(It has not been in use today)

[2023-03-21T12:24:30.451Z] Failed to handle charger state 721: SyntaxError: Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0