Interesting idea, what loads would you turn on? Save your laundry, charge your car, electric water heater. My knee-jerk reaction is the convenience of using those things when you want out way the potential savings… maybe the car?
I don’t know of anyone who’s fully automated it. There are some people who get phone notifications based on their tesla powerwall statistics so they can make decisions about what to run. The specific integration is quite old and I’m not sure it works anymore, but you might check out the following thread:
Also, someone did one a few years ago for fronius, but again it’s probably out of date now:
And there was one for Enphase Envoy, but the author is no longer supporting it:
So these are just some ideas to look at.
One thing to be aware of is that if you are querying a cloud or website, many companies put rate limits on how many times you are allowed to poll that information per day, and that includes information you need for other parts of your system. So that’s something you need to look into as well if there’s a cloud involved. Typically you’ll be limited to about one query every 15 minutes for this kind of purpose, but it does vary from company to company.
Sorry for the delay. Was expecting to get notification of replies to comments from the system. Need to look at that next.
Like you implied, it needs to not impact convenience and therefore works best when the device can be delayed (aka “Load Shifting”) without the user noticing it.
See below for the type of loads that I am proposing to control. Been doing it via remote switching for a couple of years and have got fed-up with it.
The idea is to write a SmartApp that intelligently controls devices, not write inverter device drivers. Hope to post requirements tomorrow which should clarify the operation better and give opportunities for people to get involved as a community project.
Also, rather than trying to talk to the inverters directly, the intention is to add non-intrusive power monitors - making that part trivial and able to work with all types of inverters.
Been playing with some code over the weekend so that looks doable - watch this space.
But I will probably need some help with the advanced stuff.