Home automation for Agile

Archerychick

Hello!

I’ve ended up down a rabbit hole 😂.

Ive got an oil filled radiator which is in a smart plug, I’ve been using the Alexa re outlines to set a time for this to go on and off based on energy prices, which got me to thinking.

can I automatically have it switching on when energy reaches a certain cost and off when it rises above a set cost. I have found  https://ifttt.com/explore but I can’t for the life of me work out how I would do this integrating with my smart plug which is an Amazon Alexa device.

has anyone done this? If so how? Thank you!

FreeBear

A couple of links for you...

https://ifttt.com/applets/j4udbHYf-when-price-drops-below-6p-turn-on-sockets - Looks like this might do what you want, but...

https://help.ifttt.com/hc/en-us/articles/19823288619419-An-important-update-to-the-Alexa-IFTTT-service

If you want another rabbit hole to disappear down, I can recommend Home Assistant. I'm using it with a bunch of smart home stuff based on the ESP32 chipset which is found in a lot of smarts. Light switches was the first to get flashed, and now I've gone and bought some mains powered boards with 10A relays attached. Sonoff Basic is also a neat little product if you just want a relay and no IO.

HA has an integration for Agile, so would be trivial to set up an automation that is triggered with a fall in price. And having everything in-house, you are not reliant on continued support from the likes of Google or Amazon.

Archerychick

FreeBear said:

A couple of links for you...

https://ifttt.com/applets/j4udbHYf-when-price-drops-below-6p-turn-on-sockets - Looks like this might do what you want, but...

https://help.ifttt.com/hc/en-us/articles/19823288619419-An-important-update-to-the-Alexa-IFTTT-service

If you want another rabbit hole to disappear down, I can recommend Home Assistant. I'm using it with a bunch of smart home stuff based on the ESP32 chipset which is found in a lot of smarts. Light switches was the first to get flashed, and now I've gone and bought some mains powered boards with 10A relays attached. Sonoff Basic is also a neat little product if you just want a relay and no IO.

HA has an integration for Agile, so would be trivial to set up an automation that is triggered with a fall in price. And having everything in-house, you are not reliant on continued support from the likes of Google or Amazon.

Thank you! I found that one but I guess I couldn’t get it to work because Alexa support has been removed. I’ll take a read of the other link in more detail tomorrow, and yes thanks for the other potential rabbit hole 😆🫣

FreeBear

Archerychick said: thanks for the other potential rabbit hole 😆🫣

About to order a natty little 4" LCD display with an ESP32 inside - Going to use it as a graphical front end for thermostat control linked to my Home Assistant system. A couple more rabbit holes to jump down if you want to follow...

https://www.openhasp.com - For the display.

https://esphome.io/index.html - For all your other smart sensors & controls.

https://github.com/FreeBear-nc/esphome-opentherm - Gratuitous plug for an ESP32 based boiler control 

wrf12345

I had an electric heater that switched on and off via relays (three levels of heat), the relays powered by a small solar panel on the outside wall (12V relay for turning on and off a 240V switch), to roughly match the then free solar on the roof that had been fitted, so when the sun shone the heater came on. Worked but the relays turned off at a different voltage so it was still running when there was not enough electric for free heat. No circuits just the heater rewired with the relays inline. All good fun.

mmmmikey

Hi - another Home Assistant fan here - hours of fun or frustration depending on your mindset. I've just reconfigured my installation based on the experience of using it for a year or so to control heating, hot water, curtains, blinds, lights and Sonos speakers. The more I automate with it the more I want to. 

I'm not on Agile at the moment - Tracker was better for me over the winter because of the need for peak time electricity for heating, and Flux is better for me than Agile over the summer because I import very little and export loads. I have solar panels and a battery system upgrade means I can export when the rates are best.

I did have Agile rates controlling things like water heating times last year, and expect to go back to it next winter now I have enough battery capacity to avoid peak time imports. I started using IFTTT but found that it wasn't really responsive or robust enough to rely on to control all my heating / hot water. So I wrote my own Python scripts to get the Agile data directly from Octopus and put it into Home Assistant using webhooks. This resolved the problems of using IFTTT and worked flawlessly once it was all set up and working.

My current project involves setting up a separate Raspberry Pi running Node Red, Mosquitto, Influxdb and ESPHome for energy and tariff monitoring. I'll use that to generate an optimised schedule for the following day and load it into Home Assistant each evening. Not doing anything I couldn't do in Home Assistant directly. I'm doing it that way to keep Home Assistant simple and robust as it now forms a critical part of my home heating system and I don't want to break it whilst playing with home made sensors and the like. I'm also in the final stages of making my solar generation meter provide the same data as my smart meter, using an ESP32 board and pulse counter. The good news is it's raining heavily here today so I have a good excuse to play with it rather than do anything useful.

Hours of fun - and should all pay for itself just in time for my 122nd birthday :-) :-) :-)

@Archerychick a suggestion would be to invest a tenner or so in a Tapo P110 smart plug which you can control easily from IFTTT. If you get bitten by the bug you'll find it easy to integrate into pretty much any smart home automation system, and if not it's handy anyway as a robust and reliable timeswitch / energy monitor :-)

@FreeBear have just bookmarked your GitHub page and will explore with interest later :-)

FreeBear

mmmmikey said: My current project involves setting up a separate Raspberry Pi running Node Red, Mosquitto, Influxdb and ESPHome for energy and tariff monitoring.

Tip, do not use SDHC for the databases - I found the cards lasting a matter of months before dying. Now use a dedicated low power x86 box as a data store. Will eventually migrate HA across to it once I'm shot of some Nexus 433MHz sensors.

Archerychick

mmmmikey said:

@Archerychick a suggestion would be to invest a tenner or so in a Tapo P110 smart plug which you can control easily from IFTTT. If you get bitten by the bug you'll find it easy to integrate into pretty much any smart home automation system, and if not it's handy anyway as a robust and reliable timeswitch / energy monitor :-)

Thank you! I have some other Tapo devices (cameras) and they have always been robust, thanks for the suggestion 

mmmmikey

FreeBear said:

mmmmikey said: My current project involves setting up a separate Raspberry Pi running Node Red, Mosquitto, Influxdb and ESPHome for energy and tariff monitoring.

Tip, do not use SDHC for the databases - I found the cards lasting a matter of months before dying. Now use a dedicated low power x86 box as a data store. Will eventually migrate HA across to it once I'm shot of some Nexus 433MHz sensors.

Thanks :-) I'm using SSDs for the Pi's which are cheap as chips now. I have 3 Pi's - one running Home Assistant, another running Open Media Vault and the one that I'm building at the moment for Node Red etc. All powered by a couple of mobility scooter batteries which get charged up each night, and all backed up daily. So should be suitably resilient. All good fun!