Automation tasks underway

I have the following automation tasks underway, in various stages of completion:

  • If there is a suitably inexpensive timeslot overnight, use it to top up the batteries to 100%. Using this, instead of solar, will allow more solar to be exported at 15p/kWh. Inexpensive slots during sunlight hours are not as useful because I can't export at the same time as using electricity from the grid.
  • If there is not a suitably inexpensive timeslot overnight, top up the batteries from the grid during the period coming up to peak time (which is usually fairly reasonably priced).
  • Make sure any battery charging from the grid is definitely off before the 4pm-7pm peak rate starts.
  • When the electricity price goes negative, boost the hot water temperature using the heat pump and immersion heater. This is a way of benefitting from being PAID to use electricity and storing a little of it in the form of hot water.
  • Change the colour of a lamp in the kitchen to reflect the current electricity price, accounting for free solar too.

I am finding the learning curve for Home Assistant pretty steep. The style of programming is rather alien to me. I'm more used to C or, at a pinch, C++. However, I have managed to get quite a lot of stuff working since I received the Home Assistant Green last week.

Fortunately, there are a lot of bits of example code online. So I'm not starting entirely from scratch. Fetching the Octopus Agile prices and parsing them to generate numerical values (quite a difficult task to figure out in YAML) was already done for me.

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