Pod Point EV Charger Integration

Hi,

Looks cool.

Are you saying the orange and yellow leads are for starting and stopping the charge (lock and unlock) and this can be used with a relay for scheduling purposes?

Thanks.

Yep. It will work like that.

Thank you for sharing this. That is a really useful mod indeed. I look forward to having a bit of time to look at this and I hope it will straight forward enough since I have a Solo 3, I have no idea if the board has changed much between the two iterations.

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Thanks. What is the name and size of connectors you are using to mount the terminal?

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Couldn’t say for sure. They were leftovers from a wemos d1 pack that I snipped, so standard header size and a load of breadboard leads.

Fear this mod might get in the way of the main podpoint integration chat, so I’ve pushed it over to:-
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/podpoint-rate-of-charge-modification-for-solar-pv/417459

Thank you for building this integration. Is anything extra required to pull the energy usage data in to the Energy dashboard? I’m new to the energy monitoring side of homeassistant, but can’t see the podpoint as an option under individual devices.
Thanks,
Matt

anyone else seeing this?

image

saw this in the logs

Hi @mattcd216,
Nothing extra is needed, simply add the total energy consumption sensor as a ‘device’ and your usage with be tracked day to day as you use the pod.

Currently long term history is not stored so if you remove and re-add the integration the first day shows a spike, this isn’t something I can fix at the moment with the existing PodPoint APIs

Hi @tomcoleman, Just wanted to check ig this was still an issue for you? The error log you have shown seems to be related to your home assistant installation rather than the pod point integration, looks like a device limit issue?

@eximo84 it looks like they have made a change to their APIs to show the actual time spent delivering charge, which I now expose as a sensor and could be used to better calculate a cost. It comes in as seconds (with some rounding down on the pod point side)

Thanks for the help. The device/sensor took a few days to appear in the drop-down menu.
Docs mention to add the " Current Charge Energy sensor as a device".
My sensors:
image
However I’m getting minus usage in the Energy dashboard…!
image
The car was charging overnight last night, so I wonder if the midnight crossover has confused things for today’s readings.
I think I need an idiot’s guide to the energy dash - not getting on very well with it.
Matt

Seeing zero consumption for podpoint now. It seems to appear during/after a charge briefly, but isn’t holding in the dashboard.

@mattcd216 try changing over from the current energy value to the total value in the energy dashboard, that may give you more joy.

The total consumption value is an ever increasing number from Pod Point which internally in the HA dashboard will show the change over time.

RegardIng the negative amounts that shouldn’t happen, but I’ve not tested the current value in the dashboard. My assumption there is that as the current charge value drops from say 1.2kwh to 0 when you end a charging session (unplug the car) Its seeing that as a -1.2kwh value.

The current value is something like:
If latest charge session does not have an end time, assume it is ongoing and display the charge value.
Else if the latest session has an end time, show 0

The actual increase you see in HA is because when we poll Pod Point (every 5 minutes by default) we see what the latest charge session value is, and if that has increased, we tell HA the new number.

With the total charge value we get every charge you have ever made, grouped by the pod that you actually charged at. For your home pod we show that value.

I hope this helps!

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That’s the one, thanks for the help!

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@mattrayner is there a way to view or get the energy consumption in watts on the sensor ?

sensor.psl_24xxx_current_energy_2

As im using another energy card and the kwh is missing it up

Hey @tomcoleman Unfortunately the data sent from PodPoint is only in kWh. Additionally, it is a rounded value on their side so you lose precision.

You could create a template sensor to do the conversion from kWh to Watts, but it would be ‘lumpy’ as the precision is X.Y kWh (1.2 kWh for example) on the pod point side.

It’s probably not something I would look to add directly into the integration as it could confuse some end users and create an additional support load as it jumps

ok thank you, so if we made a sensor 1.2 would be rounded to 1000w - doesnt need to be granualr and happy to test :slight_smile:

This may be a little off-topic, but I’ve noticed an ‘interesting’ behaviour exhibited by my Pod Point Solo 3.
For context, I had solar panels installed in July, and was unable to charge the car when the solar panels were producing electricity. I got in touch with PodPoint, and said they would ‘amend the charger settings’. Shortly after I was able to charge during solar production. But this is where things get interesting. When production is at maximum (about 3.6kW), the charger tries not to consume more than that. When solar production falls, it starts charging at 7kW. That would not be a problem, except that I have no control over the speed of charge at all. I can’t charge full speed if solar production is at maximum :puzzled:

Here’s an example:

Quite baffled that it is the default behaviour, without any explanation from PodPoint.

@mattrayner great integration! Thank you for all your efforts. Couple of months ago I got a Pod Point Solo3 installed but had to wait until last week for the car.
I’ve been reading up on issues reported by others and think I have a handle on what can/can’t be shown in integration due to api limitations.
I have noticed that the ‘Completed Charge Time’ isn’t accurately reflecting the Pod Point info. Any ideas if this is due to the API or something else? Am I correct in think Completed Charge Time is the Charge Duration?