Home Assistant!

[ivan]

You can use this item to monitor power flow up to 100A for getting EV charging into your Home Assistant calculation:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005970977803.html

It's around £20, and monitors electric flow in both directions (but only one direction is entitied into Home Assistant, as far as I know, unless you're clever and can set up local tuya, which I haven't managed to do yet). It also allows you to remotely switch off the circuit and (via tuya) monitor daily consumption/generation - eg this is today's power production for a 7.8kW bank of PV panels:

[Stinsy]

Thanks Ivan,

I use the Tuya integration to control my A2A.

The challenge I have is that my time comes in small chunks. I’m interested to see what others are doing though because it gives me inspiration! I’ve gotten the hang of monitoring stuff, the next step is getting it to do stuff. Eg control how many hours the HP in the garden office charges for based on weather, and have better control of it not charging (if I’m not using the office on a Wednesday I need to remember to turn it off then remember to turn it on again.

[ivan]

Im in exactly the same boat! I only ever have an hour here and half an hour there.

I've done exactly the same as you.....very slowly, too. Each stage has taken me months:

Stage 1 - get home assistant up and running on a raspberry pi.
Stage 2 - get some monitoring going - I used some esp32 modules, with some very basic code to log the outputs of DHT22 and DHT11 temperature/humidity sensors.
Stage 3 - get the esp32 data into home assistant and import stuff that I can access via Tuya (heatpump / hive / RGBW light bulbs etc), then started adding other inputs such as Tesla/Weatherstation etc
Stage 4 - Get some relay boards running that can be used to turn things on/off - these are really cheap on aliexpress. I bought one that is simply ethernet controlled - so I've got some buttons on my home assistant that send 'curl' commands to turn them on/off. And I got another that is tuya-based, so I can import the control from Tuya into homeassistant. Think each one board cost me about £25 and there are 16 relays on each.
Stage 4 - write some basic control for turning lights on/off in home assistant rather than in tuya

Next stage is to get the relay board wired up so that I can start switching pumps/ventilation / UFH / dehumidifier etc and then after that I've got to learn how to use local tuya so that I can get data out of the devices that don't readily share entities through tuya