Home Assistant (nerdy) charging automation

[scharnhorst310]

Hey guys, I know a small minority will find this interesting but so be it, I had fun making it work. Basically I want to charge as slow as possible and have the car at a higher state of charge for as little amount of time as possible. This is what I did to make that work.

I had a juicebox charger... but ofcourse they went under so luckily openevse makes a kit where you rip the guts out and put in their open source brains in it. Combined that with Home Assistant, i liked how much control over charging current I had. The thing is we usually only use about 20-25% of the a battery a day. I don't want to charge at 40amps and have the car sitting all night at a higher state of charge. Ok so why not set it lower, maybe only use 32amps or lower... but what if there were outlier days need to charge more or less.

So when car plugs in, automation runs and checks in with the porsche to get the latest info on state of charge and target charge. It then runs some math to figure that I've got X amount of time between now and (i set it to 6am but it could be whenever). Then it sets the amperage to charge out to whatever fits best, so maybe 9 amps.

Just thought it was a fun thing to try as Porsche works with Home Assistant so why not.

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[chaz]

Very cool! I was hoping the “Departure” schedule would kinda do this but I tried it last night and it still finished 5 hours before my scheduled departure.

 

[scharnhorst310]

Yeah the departure setting with the car I don't care what i try it never seems to quite work the way I expect. Not to mention since it doesn't talk with the charger, it just pulls the full 40 amps every time. I kinda prefer the idea around trickle charging over a longer period of time vs "fast" over a short.

 

[CandianPorsche83]

Love this “nerdy” stuff!

 

[ChrisFromUK]

I've just installed my Home Assistant and am getting to grips with integrating with the Solar Inverter, batteries and Car Charger.

For some reason, it never occurred to me that there would be a Porsche integration so many thanks for your post and best wishes setting up your charging configuration.

I'll be configuring the solar system and batteries to work more optimally when the charging is charging the car.

I've worked out that spending a small fortune (so my wife says...) to buy the kit and absolutely ages configuring this to work exactly how I want it to will save exactly zero money - so definitely worth doing.

I might look into doing something similar to you too although I only have a 6 hour overnight charging window for cheap rate electricity, so about 42kwh or rough 40% added to the car so probably no advantage in charging slower - but that's really not the point I suppose.......

 

[scharnhorst310]

I've got a home energy tracker setup with home assistant but since I don't pay for time of day rates, its more just for my own interest at the moment.

I've also done some other things with all this which have even less value but are entertaining to me

When the car is plugged in, a lifx light strip does a little dance while the handshake is occurring then based on the amperage going in, the amount of zones on the light strip light up. So 40 amps = 24 zones so the full strip is green (and pulses). If say at 6 or 9 amps then only 1-2 zones are lit up. Just a fun visual cue. Also only kicks in when it detects motion in the garage, i.e. someone is there; otherwise its off completely or only at 1% brightness.

I've added a redundant check so at 1am, check with the car again, adjust the amperage as needed. So if something went wrong on the first check, it can catch up and go full 40 amps if needed.

Setup a bypass button for all this so say I need to recharge quickly as the car will be in use again shortly. I've setup a little shelly button at the charger or can use "hey google turn on EV boost mode" and it will bypass all of that stuff and crank up the juice.

I've used Gemini and Claude for some of this stuff but still required a decent amounts of tweaks to get right.

 

[Dragon Tourniquet]

I wish Porsche allowed creating a second account that you could set restrictions on (such as only read TPMS and state of charge, no reading of position / speed, and no ability to control anything). That why I could set this up and not worry that if someone hacked my HA instance they could locate the car, open the doors / trunk and take what they want. Or see that the car is away from home and then know there is a better chance the home is empty.

Yep, I'm paranoid about this type of stuff.

Related: has anyone figured out what rtl_433 settings are needed to pick up the TPMS readings on the car?

 

[scharnhorst310]

That's very cool!

I have a JuiceBox as well and haven't been able to get it to work with Voltie since they took over from EnelX. I've got most of my house set up with HomeKit (Apple Home as it will be called soon) and played with HomeBridge for a while too.

Worth spending the time/effort to set up everything with Home Assistant?

My gut says home assistant is gaining ground, more people want and expect local control. So i think investment in time there has value. Also the fact it isn't run by some corp, mostly open source, lots and lots of smart people building on this stuff... I feel like not something that the plug is just going to get pulled.

I got homebridge working with my ecobee thermostats, was semi a pain but been rock solid since.

As for the juicebox, this wasn't such an ordeal. I'm glad a gave it a try vs junking the thing
https://store.openevse.com/products...t5BkQxXu7calTEDCtzMAD6Hm2R6k9_A-hcFaH0h65egAz

 

[scharnhorst310]

I wish Porsche allowed creating a second account that you could set restrictions on (such as only read TPMS and state of charge, no reading of position / speed, and no ability to control anything). That why I could set this up and not worry that if someone hacked my HA instance they could locate the car, open the doors / trunk and take what they want. Or see that the car is away from home and then know there is a better chance the home is empty.

Yep, I'm paranoid about this type of stuff.

Related: has anyone figured out what rtl_433 settings are needed to pick up the TPMS readings on the car?

So the open doors, trunk stuff does not appear to work with home assistant. At least i've not gotten it to work.

That being said i've locked down my network relatively tight, but I still believe in the fall back of having notifications sent for any sort of sensitive activity. So if garage opens or doors get unlocked, etc. it will send my phone an alert.

 

[jwatte]

I like home assistant. With a good Zigbee receiver you can put low-effort buttons anywhere you want in your house, and make them "do things." I don't like most Smart things, but HA is good stuff.

 

[slythegrin]

Our setup at home's with fronius' wattpilot combined with solar and battery. Set it to eco mode, and it charges the car whenever solar generation is above 1.5kW; which is above the house's base load. When it falls below, power is automatically routed to the house/battery and it'll continue with the car when it goes above... been working quite well so far. Hardly use power from the gird these days!

 

[refazi]

Unfortunately Juicebox is dead (i had that about a decade ago..)
Wallbox and Grizzl-e are good options for home assistant, i personally use the Ubiquiti EVSE but it seems like it's about to be EOL too and it works great if you already have Unifi Network/Protect, i wouldn't recommend it as a standalone.

Refael.

 

[scharnhorst310]

Unfortunately Juicebox is dead (i had that about a decade ago..)
Wallbox and Grizzl-e are good options for home assistant, i personally use the Ubiquiti EVSE but it seems like it's about to be EOL too and it works great if you already have Unifi Network/Protect, i wouldn't recommend it as a standalone.

Refael.

I've setup 3 of the unifi EVSE chargers at family residences, and they are great quality... but been pretty lackluster in automations and control.

 

[refazi]

Automations are available , have you looked into that?

 

[kqkqkkqkqkqkqkkqkqkq]

Thanks!

Deployed HA in a VM last night and quickly searched for the Porsche integration in HA but didn’t see it.
Is it an external project? Would you have a link to the one you’re using?

https://github.com/CJNE/ha-porscheconnect - you'll need to install HACS first.

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