Home Energy Autopilot — charge the battery when power is cheap, run the house off it when it's expensive

Blueprints Exchange
1

Been running this at home for a month and finally cleaned it up into a blueprint.

What it does: it’s the decision layer. It watches your dynamic price sensor
and decides CHARGE / DISCHARGE / IDLE. You wire your own battery’s control into
three action inputs, so it works with any battery — Anker Solix, Marstek, Victron,
Sonnen, whatever you can already control from HA. The brain decides, your actions
execute.

I split it that way because every battery integration is different, but the logic
is always the same. This way nobody has to fork it for their hardware.

Inputs

  • Price sensor (Nord Pool, Tibber, aWATTar, EPEX, …)
  • Cheap threshold — charge at or below this price
  • Expensive threshold — discharge at or above
  • Battery SoC sensor (optional — leave empty to skip the guards)
  • Stop charging above X % (default 95)
  • Keep a reserve, don’t discharge below X % (default 20)
  • Charge / discharge / idle actions

The gap between the two thresholds is a neutral band on purpose. Without it the
automation flaps every time the price sits right on the line. Triggers on price
change and every 5 minutes.

Honest caveat: this only makes sense on an hourly/dynamic tariff. On a flat
rate there’s nothing to arbitrage and the battery won’t pay for itself. Solar
helps but isn’t required.

Real numbers from my own setup (Germany, balcony solar + one small battery):
15.67 EUR last week, about 2.50 a day. Not spectacular, but it’s fully hands-off.

Open your Home Assistant instance and show the blueprint import dialog with a specific blueprint pre-filled.

Feedback on the logic welcome — especially from anyone running a battery I haven’t
tested against.

Home Energy Autopilot: a 7-state machine that buys power on the cheap hours (architecture, real numbers, lessons)
2

Since a few of you have imported it: the part that trips people up is the three action inputs, so here’s a concrete example for a battery exposed as a number entity.

Charge action:

- action: number.set_value  target: { entity_id: number.battery_charge_power }  data: { value: 800 }

Discharge action: same call, but the discharge power entity. Idle action: set both to 0, or whatever your battery calls “self-use”.

If you want the reasoning behind the thresholds and the numbers I ended up with, I wrote up the whole build here: The Home Energy Autopilot — cut your power bill with Home Assistant