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I explained my choice: the Pi is a widely supported and used piece of hardware which is likely to be supported for a very long time. The Green on the other hand is custom hardware and whilst a good option for some, its smaller user base make it more likely to experience bugs (purely a numbers game) and more difficult to replace like for like in the future.

Thank you!

For a Pi 4, you connect via USB and boot from that drive. You can do the same on a Pi 5 if you want, or you can use the NVMe interface directly (not USB) for faster disk access.

On a zero?! Wow, I didn’t think it had the compute power. Nice one.

@@SpeakToTheGeekTech yeah, i have 2 shelly energy meter, 5 bt temp and humidity sensors with bt proxy and couple of led bulbs. and several shelly switches. it holds stable.

I thought Powerwalls were pretty much read-only in terms of the control you have via HA but I've been corrected today that you can set the reserve %age too which effectively means you can stop/start the discharge. I'm assuming you know that given your comment, so are you saying it's hit and miss whether sending those commands actually reach your battery?

@@SpeakToTheGeekTechPowerwall control is not hit and miss, it’s perfectly reliable. It does however require the Tesla Custom Integration via HACS to give full control as the built-in Tesla integration is read only.

Yup a great option, but not really suitable for a total beginner due to the extra complication of running your own virtualisation host, which is why I suggested the Pi. If you're comfortable with virtualisation then nothing wrong with your approach, although I personally would have avoided VMware due to their recent licensing controversy. Something like Proxmox is considered is considered to be a friendlier product from a hobbyist perspective now and HA runs nicely on that as a virtual machine (or even a Docker container if you wanted to go down that route)

Good luck and thanks!

Hopefully it'll be super-simple to set up for you, I've tried to make it as easy as possible

Yes, the HA Green will work just fine with the automation and instructions next week. I just prefer the Raspberry Pi as a hardware solution over the HA Green for a number of reasons, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with using a HA Green at all.

I’m not the most tech savy person you’ll ever meet so the built option felt safer for me. If I can’t find a video that tells me how to solve my problem then I’m a bit lost.

Yup, whatever works best for you! I would say though that your setup is probably not best for beginners :) Promox is a learning curve in itself!

As long as it works for you, that's what matters. My advice is only a suggestion based on the logic I described but there's no wrong answer I guess if something suits you better.

Ahh ok I see the message now!

Do you mind me asking how you controlled the Powerwall using Home Assistant? I thought their API only allowed read-only access apart from to take the home off-grid?

You can control a few aspects of the Tesla API from Home Assistant. As you said Home Assistant is fiddly to learn and setup but once its working the automations are relatively easy to use and can offer many complex scenarios. I control the Backup Reserve %. If you set this to the current battery % value this effectively stops the battery discharging. If you want to also charge the battery while the cars charging then you just up this to 100% and the Powerwall starts charging. This can be done relatively easily with a Home Assistant automation. I do not have any way to know the Octopus schedule at present ( presumably they will offer an API in future) but I do have a CT clamp on my car charging cable so I know when my car is charging or not. The CT clamp can be read by Home Assistant so this can trigger automations. I have some automation which detect when the car is charging. So based on what time it starts/stops I can presume it’s an Octopus schedule as I typically only charge the car overnight. I assume any stop/start charge before 10am is from Intelligent Octopus so I control the battery based on that. This is relatively simple but works very well. So if Octopus stop and re-start the charge a few times then the battery synchronises with this and importantly does not discharge into the car. There is a slight sting in the tail though. The Tesla API has recently just changed its authentication mechanism and so it’s quite difficult to get Home Assistant integrated with the Tesla Fleet API. Its really for those who are very technically minded and understand API and development commands like curl and understand hosting private / public keys. I guess Tesla wants their API to be as safe as possible so this is why you have to jump through a lot of hoops to be able to use it. Hopefully Tesla will make this integration easier in future or perhaps Tesla will improve their hardware. The Powerwall could also do with a special CT clamp integrated to the Powerwall software so the Tesla system can detect when a car is charging. Perhaps they will offer this in future but for now its a fairly involved DIY project to work this out. Tesla Fleet API integration notes are here. I had to follow all of this. www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tesla_fleet/ Hopefully Gary will find some easy way to do this.

Didnt think you could access the Tesla Powerwall 3 from HA. Believe you can control it using automations in the netzero app. ​@SpeakToTheGeekTech

Yes, physically making sure your wiring is set up as you describe is one way around the problem. Not possible for many people though, and I think Gary will be discussing that in his video next week as one of the possible solutions. You could use my automation with the Ohme but you would need to install a power monitor on the Ohme's feed and create a binary sensor that is on when power is flowing, off when no power is flowing, effectively giving you a sensor that says "car is charging". You can use that as the signal to my automation (coming up next week, or live now for members/patreons) to tell the battery to start./ stop charging.

​@@SpeakToTheGeekTech There is a Home Assistant integration with Ohme chargers which means you don't need the power monitor.

With Home Assistant, you should start with "I have a problem that needs solving" rather than "I'd like to see what I can do with Home Assistant". If you go with the latter then you tend to end up with a server sitting there doing nothing because you're not sure what its purpose is. Hopefully this automation (coming next week unless you are a channel member or Patreon, in which case it's up right now) can be the catalyst to get you started :)

@SpeakToTheGeekTech for sure - and getting the domestic battery to charge at these odd times is exactly what I'd like Home Assistant to do! I'll keep an eye out for how Gary gets on with it.

Home Assistant Green is lower spec than a Pi 5 and also custom hardware. As mentioned in the video, a Pi is very widely used and supported so you will almost certainly see fewer bugs overall and it'll be easy to get a replacement Pi from a variety of suppliers if something went wrong. The Green also only has 32GB eMMC storage built-in so tricky to expand if needed. By using a separate SSD you get faster storage, longer lasting storage (most likely) and it's easy to swap over or re-image if needed. Absolutely nothing wrong with a Green, but I personally think a Pi is a better choice. They're also made very locally to where I live (Bridgend), so supporting local businesses!

@ sounds good, I went with a green just for convenience, that said I have 3 Pis as well

Yeah, it is a convenient all-in-one package. But I like my Pi :) And just so as you are aware, you are on my Home Assistant Nemesis dashboard... keeping an eye on your subscriber count going up, can't have it overtaking me! I've got to put in some serious work to stay ahead :)

@ lol i am honoured to be a Nemesis, given I’m a mere beginner with HA, however do have a video or two planned for February on the topic 😂

British green-tech TH-camrs can earn a place on the dashboard :) There's always one Prime Nemesis though which is my target to catch and overtake, with everyone else on there with a 'must keen an eye on' status. Shan from Everything Home was my first Prime Nemesis, then I moved on to Tim & Kat's Green Walk. I've currently given myself a stretch target of EV Nick but his Cosy 6 adventure gave him a boost. He knows I'm coming for him though, I'm biding my time :)

You can choose a Yellow or a Green or whatever hardware you like. My point with using a regular off the shelf Pi is ease of obtaining a replacement quickly if you need to. It’s not really any more complex than a Yellow/Green really

@@SpeakToTheGeekTechSays someone suffering with significant unconscious competence. For the average non-technical solar/battery/EV user they’re worlds apart! They’re gonna struggle enough with the software, without having to familiarise themselves with hardware concepts for no real benefit.

@@SpeakToTheGeekTech A green all in would have been a cleaner and cheaper solution.

Ahaa but it doesn’t feature the legendary Gary :)

@SpeakToTheGeekTech agreed but nice to see examples for other different types of battery and inverter.

Yup, I can't test on other systems so it's interesting to see how they are controlled.

This is still the method for multi-rate tariffs on the energy dashboard, I have another video too if you have certain specific Octopus Energy smart tariffs.

I just schedule it to heat off-peak at night and that usually does me throughout the rest of the day. Occasionally the kids drain the tank and it reheats at peak, but that's not that often. I wouldn't want to divert solar at the moment anyway, I get more for exporting that I pay for importing off-peak.

Do you mean you have a 7.1kW heat loss in your house from the survey?

@@SpeakToTheGeekTech yes - heat loss

So it's not really possible at all for me to answer your question because there are a huge number of variables. The quick answer though is to get as much battery storage (energy = kWh) as you possibly can afford and an inverter that can output as much power (power = kW) as possible. With 7.1kw of heat loss they probably install an 8 or 10kW heat pump. That is heat power output, so in reality would draw between 0.5 - 4kW of power. You need to consider that a 3kW inverter will only output 3kW, so anything you draw (in your home or from the heat pump) over that comes from the grid. The GivEnergy AIO outputs 6kW, their new AIO v2 will do 12kW, I think the Powerwall 3 does 10kW (someone will correct me). Your energy use in your home will be added to your heat pump usage too which Octopus will have given you an energy estimation for, just divide their estimate up per winter's day and add to your normal daily usage to get a rough answer for how big your battery needs to be. But, my 21.7kWh of energy in my batteries isn't enough to completely get through most winter days with my 6kW heat pump that draws about 0.5-2kW normally.

Brilliant news. Yes, sometimes that redirect doesn't work on some people's networks. I've seen some home routers not like the local DNS resolution, and if you have multiple installations of Home Assistant then it also gets confusing. Glad you figured it out though.

You can't apply it historically using Home Assistant. It is technically possible to directly access the database, calculate the values yourself and insert records accordingly, but that would require a lot of programming outside of Home Assistant.

Me too! I'm working on a tutorial video for the automation I've put together, but I've no idea what Gary is going to think of it all so I'm as invested in this story as I hope the audience is :)

Welcome to the dark side :) Or the light side, it depends how you set the automation up!

To be fair you do have a lot more free time now to lose in home assistant 😂

Home Assistant is more a whole server operating system than just an application although you can run a cut down version as an application if you wish: www.home-assistant.io

@ thank's

Glad to hear that!

A small array is still a lot better than nothing!

My system isn't big enough to cover the bills, it just reduces the bills. It's that reduction in bills that I am counting as the savings towards paying back the original investment. Once that's paid off, it will hopefully continue giving me a saving on my bills.

I'm in South Wales so a bit further North than you so mine will be a bit lower, plus the shading on mine late afternoon really hits my generation at times. Sounds like you are in a better position!

Thanks. It can only display in Home Assistant the data that the inverter is providing it with. If it’s energy data that’s wrong, try wrapping the energy sensor in a daily cycled utility meter and it’ll reset to zero each day

Perfetto oggi funziona quasi tutto, per lo meno mi legge i dati di produzione. Mi mancano i dati del consumo abitazione e stato della batteria, dovrò installare Tesla per i sensori, ho una powerwall 2 con gateway Perfect, today almost everything works, at least it reads the production data to me. I am missing data on home consumption and battery status, I will have to install Tesla for the sensors, I have a powerwall 2 with gateway

Nice! You’re far more sensible than me, I couldn’t tell you where the spare money is going but I certainly don’t have it to hand!

I wouldn't recommend that! In theory if you totally isolated your home from the grid first then V2L could be used to power the home and subsequently charge the battery, but if it's connected to the grid in any way then you are illegally connecting a generation source to the grid and potentially violating your car's warranty.

​@@SpeakToTheGeekTech AIO and Car are both charged from grid and AIO can discharge to grid, so if/what makes car a generator and not the battery? Vision was V2L feeding at 1kWh controlled by Shelly through HA only when battery < 80% and cut off when over with AIO told to always charge from solar feed.

And it will become a mess! Categorise and label everything as you create it or it becomes a nightmare a year later, trust me!

I've no idea why, but I've lived here for over 15 years and it's always been the same - regular little outages and the occasional longer one. It can go for months with no blackouts and then all of a sudden we get a couple of weeks of one every few days. And I've seen many articles arguing either way for green tech increasing or decreasing home values. What we really need is a properly baselined analysis of equivalent home sales to work out what's going on because everything I've seen is anecdotal based on estate agents talking about desirability and initial home valuations (which rarely match the actual sold value)

@@SpeakToTheGeekTech the depreciation modeling I use for myself is assuming all equipment lose 30% of value immediately after installation, then lose an average % of value each year until the warranty period ends, so you may roughly get the worth of your equipment still left when selling the property. I doubt many buyers would seriously take that into account unless it's being newly installed within 5 years, just like nobody would think a 10 year old boiler would add value on property.

Thank you very much and I'm glad it helped you!

Oh damn, unfortunately it doesn't work for me. I always get a strange message from Spook. Too bad

The Met Office API doesn’t expose published weather warnings so far as I can find. If anyone know differently please point me in the direction of the specific API call that gets me those and I’ll get cracking on an automation! But so far I’ve drawn a blank on that.

@SpeakToTheGeekTech the best I can find is a RSS feed for the different regions. I've seen a couple of examples of parsing it to look nice in HA, but nothing that is "intelligent" www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/guides/rss

@SpeakToTheGeekTech there's an RSS feed that they publish (cannot link, but you can Google it easily). Not sure how easy that is to then get into HA

​@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Theres an RSS feed for the weather warnings. Im not sure how easy that is to use in HA.

Yeah you can pull an RSS feed in to HA easily, but because it's designed for humans to read it would need processing in order to be useful. For example, you'd need to slice the text up to get the level of the warning (i.e. is it red), whether it's wind, rain or snow, etc, if it actually affects your local area (it lists all of the areas affected which could be not many or everywhere), and then it states when the warning starts and finishes. It looks like they are reasonably consistent too in their formatting, but it would only take a slight tweak to the layout to mess up the text processing and render your automations useless. If it were published via their API then it would be more reliable, and I'd rather manually check things than rely on an alert system using text processing. Perhaps when AI is more widely supported in HA, it could process it for us into a consistent format regardless of the input but we're not quite there yet (well, you can pay for OpenAI integration if you want...)

I don't think I could include that. You're just recouping a post-tax investment by not spending as much as you would have, by including also the tax on that which you also haven't had to pay you might be double-accounting. Your wages haven't changed as a consequence of you paying less on your energy bills, so you are still paying the same amount of income tax each month regardless, you just have more disposable income each month instead.

I'll wave to you over the channel then!

Very nice! Another viewer has commented to say energy prices are projected to rise quite a bit later this year so that might bring the ROI in a bit for you.