For a lot of users, the reason for getting into smart homes (ie. Home Assistant) is the idea of saving energy and/or cost of energy. We all want to control our energy usage in a better way…
Now, more than ever, with the wildly fluctuating energy prices, taking control of when usage happens is very important. Since heating our houses, heating hot water or charging EVs consme a lot of energy, the savings potential is at its greatest.
But why can we not have a scheduler that defines an amount of hours each day that consumption must happen, and allow the system to calculate when it is most appopriate to do so?
In its most basic form, I would want to set up something like “between 18:00 and 07:00 this switch must be on for at least 7 hours, but only the 7 hours where the cost is lowest”.
It could be called something like “Energy scheduler”.
Have a look at the EMHASS: An Energy Management for Home Assistant add on.
I use it daily for great effect.
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That looks like an impressive system for controlling power usage! It also looks way ore complicated than it need to be for most use cases, and it is heavily geared towards users with solar production. Also, if I understand it correctly, it depends on manully setting the cost of energy on a daily basis. We have integrations in HA that manages this, so it should be possible to set this automatically…
Have a look a bit further into the details.
EMHASS provides an optimal solution for when to run your appliances.
It doesn’t depend on solar, battery or variable pricing, but can take those into account.
It can be setup with fixed pricing, time of use schedule or in my case prices that change every 5 minutes, which I pull from my energy provider integration. Amber Electric (Australia) Custom Component
I tell it I want to run my hot water system for 6 hours a day, my filter pump for 3 hours a day and it creates an optimal schedule including switching those devices at the correct time.
If you are after a simpler solution have a look at Running Devices When Energy is Cheaper and Greener or Use Amber Electric Forecast to Optimize what hours are selected for pool pump each day
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