Hi thanks for pulling this together! My pod point has always bugged me that I couldn’t monitor it via home assistant.
I have installed via hacs and the cable sensor and switch are all setup fine. However I am getting an error on the status sensor:
Logger: homeassistant.setup
Source: setup.py:316
First occurred: 07:23:54 (1 occurrences)
Last logged: 07:23:54
Unable to prepare setup for platform pod_point.sensor: Platform not found (cannot import name 'Self' from 'typing_extensions' (/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/typing_extensions.py)).
Stumbled on this integration. Might give it a go as I have a pod point tethered charger. Issue I find is the cost is oddly calculated because of the timings.
I contacted pod point and they confirmed what you have said about time start and end is based on when the car was plugged/unplugged which is stupid.
@letchworth what version of Python are you running? It requires python 3 at the moment. I’ve also pushed a new version to HACS (we’re part of the default set of repositories now yay!). Try that and let me know what you get.
It may also be helpful to enable debug logs for pod_point with the following in your configuration.yml file
logger:
default: info
logs:
custom_components.pod_point: debug
When you connect your car (regardless of wether it is drawing power, for example your car may have a schedule to prevent charging, power balancing may be in place, or your pad may not be scheduled to start) a ‘charge’ is stared in the Pod Point system. This charge lasts for as long as the car is connected (potentially days).
It will tell you how much power (rounded) is drawn during the connected but not at what times it is drawn, or if it is actively sending power
So you plug in on 2022-01-01 @ 10:00 and unplug on 2022-01-03 @ 17:43 (one charge session) during which window you charged 11kw of power. Unfortunately there’s no supported way to find out WHEN power was drawn.
I have an idea to monitor ongoing sessions, checking every minute to see if the power count goes up, and logging that as a power draw, I’m not sure how accurate this will be or helpful. It will also only work for ‘live’ data and not historical charging
So if it shows power draw you could sort of work it out by using the schedule?
For example my schedule starts at midnight and turns off at 9am.
Based on that if I connect my car at 7pm there won’t be any power draw until my scheduled starts at 12.
Once power draw stops or goes down below pull rate you could assume the charge has finished but cable is disconnected or schedule stops this would also indicate finished charge?
For those without a schedule it would be harder I guess
At the moment it is set to a 5 minute interval for polling but when you interact with it (i.e. toggle the charging switch) that will also cause an update call.
I will add the option to change that frequency through the UI
This is looking really great. One thing that would be game changing would be to see if there’s a way to set a charging rate. There are dip switches in the unit that offer a combination of 7 settings. I’ve seen rumours that these can be remotely controlled.
The benefit would be for environments like solar installs - the dream being able to adjust the settings depending on excess solar power generation.
Apparently though, the purpose of the monitoring clamp is not only to spy on our energy consumption, I mean gather data, but to reduce the flow of energy supplied to the car if the load on the home supply is too great. So maybe an easier way would be to alter the signal from the clamp.
I haven’t messed with the clamp signal, but I can confirm the ability to change charge rate with the dip switches while the car is charging. I’m about to try an esp8285 based relay mod. Weirdly I couldn’t get the lowest setting to work. Seemed to only go as low as 2kw.
I read on a forum somewhere (sorry can’t find it now!) that folks with a looped supply were able to have the install done with it capped at half power and podpoint were able to subsequently change the power setting remotely without an engineer visit after the dno had changed their supply.
When I pull the PCB I’ll investigate a bit further. I wonder if the first 3 dip switches are more of a variable resistor…
