About a year ago, I've bought an #ev6 and have mostly been charging it at home using the single-phase charger "brick" it came with. (230V12A - 2.76kW) I don't really have to go anywhere regularly, so this has been enough charge rate for me.

The idea was to charge only during certain hours, usually at night and more frequently on the weekends, when energy prices were negative. It didn't turn out to be that easy, using only the cars app (Kia Connect) to control the charging process: charging could only be stopped, but never resumed - I had to re-plug the type 2 connector manually to start it again.

The only solution here was to switch the power supply to the charger, to the type F "Schuko" socket I've been using solely for it. Smart relay switches made by #Shelly seemed to be a good choice, so I went with a "Shelly 1PM". (Shelly's single-phase model with power metering capabilities)

First I removed the old junction box, after taking a picture of the wiring, and replaced it with a bigger one without any clamps; now I would have enough space to place the shelly and work on it comfortably. For wires, I've recycled some H07RN cable with the max. cross section of 2.5mm² and some "Wago" clamps. Then I connected the device to the outlet as shown.

Then I flicked the breaker, connected to the hotspot spawned by the shelly, and set it up to connect to my AP, DNS, NTP and MQTT server. Bluetooth and the hotspot can be deactivated after, to save "some" energy. BTW: The Shelly Plus series can also act as a range extender itself.

Using #homeassistant, and the nordpool component, I could now pull the current energy prices and simple issue a MQTT publish to turn on/off the socket. Alternatively, one can also use the Shelly integration in Home Assistant, if the device is on the same AP and not connected via a range extender.

In summer, the temps were usually still lower than 70°C @12A and not a concern. However, 7 months later they would rise to over 104°C @10A and trigger the high temperature shutoff while it was -18°C outside. I suspect this problem would have become apparent even sooner, if it wasn't for the cold winter nights (down to -29°C). Even with the charger set to only 8A, the device would now overheat. Contacting Shelly support brought me no solution; instead, they suggested their "Pro" series, which have to be installed in your power central.

Fortunately, I was able to return the set to #Amazon for a full refund.

Edit: added picture of a new socket installed later.

Home Assistant is an open source self-hosted home automation tool that puts local (not external cloud) control and privacy first. My system is running in a Docker container on a machine at home.

Home Assistant is more than just the monitoring and managing of smart home switches and lights. It has powerful automation that can be triggered by all sorts of events or device states to notify you, or manage even solar systems, garage doors, and much more. For example, I have an automation that announces it has started to rain so we can get the washing off the line before it gets too wet.

In this video I show what my HA dashboards look like, and how I managed to read lots of information via the universal Modbus TCP protocol from my Victron solar energy system, and to also write data back to the Victron system to change the battery minimum state of charge values from HA (or other registers).

I have shared my config files on a Github page so that it is easier for others to replicate some of the same functionality (without spending 4+ hours like I did on a single value statement line).

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlvlhou70VA

#technology #homeassistant #smarthome #opensource #selfhosting