this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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The UK is currently experiencing some prolonged windy weather and my all-renewable energy provider offers dynamic pricing. That means cheap energy and even negative-cost energy. This is where my HA instance shines and saves me a fortune on my power bill. Thanks again to the HA devs for this incredible project.

For the curious, I'm using bottlecapdave's excellent Home Assistant Octopus Energy integration via HACS.

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[–] rmuk 19 points 1 week ago (9 children)

Yup! No EV here, sadly, and I live in a flat but I've got storage heaters and a big hot water tank. I've got an incredibly janky template sensor that works out how many hours of heating I need for each room based on the weather forecast and an automation that activates the heaters for that many hours a day at the cheapest times. It can also turn the heating on when the price drops below a certain threshold, currently 0p.

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 6 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Are there any creative energy sinks you could run when the price goes negative? I can only think of mining crypto or transcoding video or stuff like that.

[–] Windex007@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Flip side of heating could be to lower the temperature of freezers. If the energy is free anyways.

[–] rmuk 7 points 1 week ago

In my old place I actually did this: replacing my fridge and freezer's thermostats with an ESP Home controlled relay and thermometer. This place has a fancy integrated unit that I don't want to play with too much.

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