Charging from Solar (using Clipsal Pulse)

[Iridium543]

Since getting solar installed and getting monitoring setup I was finding it annoying to manually fiddle with the Tesla app to change the charging rate on cloudy days so I wrote a fairly basic program (.Net) to handle this for me.

I gather some folks use Home Assistant to accomplish the same thing, but I just wanted something simple. Not sure what monitoring devices are popular, but swapping out reading from pulse to another system shouldn't be hard if you can code a bit.

In case anyone technical who has use for this I thought I'd post the repo link => GitHub - drgrieve/TeslaChargingManager: Charge Tesla vehicles with excess solar

In the chart marked Dishwasher the car was below minimum SOC so that is why it didn't stop charging at that point. Later on in the day I adjusted my buffer logic to be more greedy during stable conditions.

Cheers.

 

[WhiteLightng]

Nice work. I was considering doing something similar when working out what charging solution to install. Ended up just opting for the Zappi charger which achieves this straight out of the box for any EV plugged into it.

 

[israndy]

Good to know there is another charger out there with solar smarts. Here in the states I have seen the one from Emporia Energy uses their energy monitor to drive their EV charger.

I have an energy monitor called Sense that uses AI to try to break up the power going to your house into buckets labeled for the devices that are drawing power. Since I already had the amount of free solar from that and Tesla had just added the ability to remotely set the charging amps in their app (and API) I got The TeslaPy library and started writing a little Python app called TesSense this Spring to control the charging of the car based on the free solar. Check it out at GitHub:

github.com/israndy/TesSense

In the mean time I have discovered Charge HQ that handles LOTS of different equipment and cars, unfortunately they don't support my setup. Would be nice to control changes as I am out and about, although I am always home when I am charging off my solar so running TesSense on my Mac gives me much more control.