Owning an electric vehicle (EV) has been an excellent choice for me, and I thoroughly enjoy using it daily. However, there are rare occasions when it can be frustrating. For instance, one morning, I woke up to realize that I had forgotten to plug in my EV, and the battery was running low. Panic set in as I tried to figure out how to get to a fast charger while ensuring everyone gets to their destinations on time.
The car app, unfortunately, lacks an option to remind me to plug in the car before bedtime. But surely, there must be a way to create a small app using an API. After some web searching, I decided to go with Home Assistant and what a journey it has been. The more I dig in to it, the more I realise how powerful this software is.
The insights in to my electricity usage alone have made Home Assistant invaluable. It has allowed me to change my electricity usage. I now have the electricity from the grid coming in during the cheaper tariff, with the solar and battery dealing with the load during the peak cost.
I cans see the distribution of energy which is updated on an hourly basis, giving me an almost real-time insight.
Most importantly, I can get a daily breakdown of my electricity cost by day, week and month. In the example here I can see that for the 71.7 KWh that I used for the day it cost me €3.19 which works out less than 5c per KWh.
I’ll share my experience setting up Home Assistant and the benefits I’ve gained as I make my home smarter.
Follow along, and you too can build a Home Assistant server on a Raspberry Pi.
Some Achievements So Far
In-depth analysis of electricity cost, EV notifies if not plugged in at night, floodlight limited to only trigger in the early evening…
For a more complete list of what I have Home Assistant configured to do follow this link. Current Home Assistant Achievements
If you are ready to jump into the world of home automation, you can follow the guides below to set up the same as me.
Follow Along Guide
Initial Setup
Install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 5
Install HACS (Home Assistant Community Store)
Electricity Usage
Collect solar production from Huawei’s Fusion Solar app.
Add in a forecast for solar production.
Collect data from the Zappi EV charger
Combine solar production and electricity usage into one dashboard.
Update Energy Dashboard with Cost
This completes an extensive setup of Home Assistant to provide more insight into your electricity usage. As always there is a lot more that can be done. To see Further Home Assistant Integrations and Devices click here.
Darren burnett 