Hi all!
I’m very new here, and hoping that my question isn’t to vague. I really hope someone can point me in the right direction.
We’re building a new house, and what better moment to start intergrating Home assistant and planning this out to perfection. As of now i’m collecting information, and making plans on paper.
Now for my actual question:
We’re going to use a dynamic electricity contract, so a lot of price fluctiuations My obseravtion is that especially in summer, there are a lot of very cheap hourly rates. We’re also installing 16 solar panels, with a possibility of 12 more in the future.
What i would like to get going is a setup where if the complete cost of Kwh falls beneath a certain price, cryptominers will use a power consumption to get to that price. I know i can adjust the power consumption in certain miners with aftermarket firmware. I just don’t know how to set this all up in home assistant.
In summary, my idea:
If i’m returning power to grid, crypto miners kick in to balance this. If the kwh price is X, adjust power consumption of miners according to X. I would like to throttle this if my EV is charging. And the cherry on top: See in one glance what the realtime price of power consumption is and how much estimated profit the miners made.
How do i go about doing this? Not looking for a cut and clean solution, just getting pointed in the right direction, but if someone out there already has the awnser, i’d love to hear it too!
Thank you all in advance!
Hi Daan,
Congratulations on your new home! It sounds exciting.
There are a number of topics/posts in this forum. But it can be a little challenging to get started.
To start, here are a few questions:
- How to you plan to measure solar generation, grid consumption, and consumption by your various loads? There are various hardware solutions, but most people here would recommend local control of your sensors (as opposed to some service that uses the web).
- Do you have experience with Home Assistant? If so, are you a beginner, or perhaps a power user?
- What company will supply your energy? (Some have web interfaces where you can pull pricing data etc.) Cost is a major driver for many (but not all) energy automations.
- Can you write down your goals for a control system? Is there a penalty for exporting power? (I wonder if this is why you are thinking about crypto miners as a load for excess solar generation.)
Running a single load to consume excess power can be quite simple, as long as you can throttle or turn off this load when needed. But it gets complicated when there are multiple loads to manage. I’ve written my own automations for controlling two heat pumps, and it was quite a challenge for me. Here are a couple of suggestions for more complex situations.
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PV / Solar Excess Optimizer This is a BluePrint that seems to be geared toward general users of Home Assistant. There are some minor bugs and issues reported in the posts.
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EMHASS: An Energy Management for Home Assistant This is a powerful Add-On for HA that predicts when it will be best to run various loads based on history, forecast, and requirements, and of course you can use the forecast to run your home. It is for Power Users - I’ve tried to implement it myself and eventually crashed my system. But others have good success with it.
I hope this is helpful.