I recently acquired a Shelly EM Shelly EM + 120A Clamp | Shelly Store UK | Smart Home Automation to make use of our excess solar, as it's that time of the year again.
Using the data I got from it with the help from Home Assistant Home Assistant . I used a TP-Link Tapo P110 smart socket to turn on our electric heater whenever there's excess solar, which worked pretty well with low-latency. The only misgiving is that the heater does not manage to use all the excess solar, since it has a few fixed heat settings thus it usually has to turn off completely or not manage to make full use of the excess. All in all, it was a good proof-of-concept.
Today I set up Home Assistant to integrate with the car to start charging when there's a certain amount of minimum excess solar, and vary the charging amps so that it can use all of the excess, with fine granularity of up to 250W (~1A, since it's the unit of charging that the car lets us set). I managed to get 10% over 4 hour of charging:
The blue line is the charge amperage which mirrors solar output. Not a bad result for basically a lunch out and a couple of hours! . This will tide us over nicely until we get our storage battery system.
I can share my automation configuration in HA if anyone is interested.
Using the data I got from it with the help from Home Assistant Home Assistant . I used a TP-Link Tapo P110 smart socket to turn on our electric heater whenever there's excess solar, which worked pretty well with low-latency. The only misgiving is that the heater does not manage to use all the excess solar, since it has a few fixed heat settings thus it usually has to turn off completely or not manage to make full use of the excess. All in all, it was a good proof-of-concept.
Today I set up Home Assistant to integrate with the car to start charging when there's a certain amount of minimum excess solar, and vary the charging amps so that it can use all of the excess, with fine granularity of up to 250W (~1A, since it's the unit of charging that the car lets us set). I managed to get 10% over 4 hour of charging:
The blue line is the charge amperage which mirrors solar output. Not a bad result for basically a lunch out and a couple of hours! . This will tide us over nicely until we get our storage battery system.
I can share my automation configuration in HA if anyone is interested.