Project start

Now I'm really up and running with my little home project. We'll see what happens, but right now it's really fun and educational!

The project's goal is to enable homeowners a simple solution for charging the car and energy storage with, for example, 100% solar or when the spot price for electricity is at its lowest!

I will now go through some of the things I have accomplished so far!

I have ...

• written the entire project in Python, considering that it should be possible to run on a cheap and energy-efficient computer such as a Raspberry Pi that can be running 24/7 all year round lowest possible energy impact.

• written a class for communicating with Ferroamp Energy Hub's MQTT Broker. I now get regularly information of my house grid power, consumption, solar production etc.

• wrote a simple class to communicate with the Garo Web UI Rest API. I regularly retrieve information from the charging box such as charging power, accumulated energy transferred, etc. Unfortunately, there is no information about SOC or other information about the connected car. I can send commands to the charging box such as charging power, make charging box available or not. If the charging box is set to a position I call "AUTOMATIC", the charging box will try to charge the car with 100% solar energy by adjusting the charging power to get as close as possible to 0 kW in grid power. For example, if you turn on the kettle at the same time as I charge the car, the car's charge power will be set to a lower power while the water is boiling.

• prepared simpler classes to retrieve forecasts for cloudiness from SMHI and spot prices from Nordpool.

• wrote a simpler main controller that handles overall management of classes such as Ferroamp and Garo implementation.

• set up my own MQTT Broker to post and retrieve information about what my main controllers should do.

• set up MQTT Client on my mobile to be able to control charge commands with voice control.

This is what it can look like in Ferroamp's web portal after a successful charging session of the electric vehicle. In the graph you can see on the YELLOW line how the solar production varies greatly due to. cloudy weather. The charging box's charging strength, the BLUE line, is adjusted automatically to minimize energy import / export, the BLACK line.