When using dynamic pricing for your electricity it is beneficial to schedule your appliances like washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, etc. to those time slots that have the lowest energy price.
Some smart appliances already provide such features, other smart appliances only provide a way to select and start/stop a program and dumb appliances don’t provide any means to do so.
This guide focuses on bringing scheduling capabilities to those appliances that don’t support it.
When a smart appliance supports program selection and starting/stopping these features can be used in Home Assistant to schedule the appliances. For dumb devices such features need to be created using helpers.
Prerequisites
This guide assumes you know the basics of Home Assistant, like what an entity, helper and automation is and how to install custom integrations trough HACS or manually.
Goal
- Create energy usage profiles for each selected program
- Schedule appliance based on energy usage profile and lowest energy price
- Start the appliance on the scheduled time
- Send a notification when the appliance starts and is finished
- Create a pleasing dashboard card to manage the appliance
- Select the program
- Override the start time
- Show the estimated remaining time the appliance will be running
- Show the energy usage profile and energy price in a combined graph
Requirements
- Appliance that resumes after power recovery or that can be started and stopped using a Home Assistant integration
- Home Assistant
- Nord Pool integration for Home Assistant
This integration provides the spot market electricity prices for the Nordic, Baltic and part of Western Europe.
If you’re not located in this part of the world there are other integrations that provide similar features. - Martijn van der Pol’s cheapest energy hours jinja macro
This macro does all the calculations for deciding which time slot is the cheapest for the selected energy usage profile. - Smart plug with energy metering, I use the BlitzWolf BW-SHP15.
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