Hey Guys,
As part of our home automation and energy consumption we are trying to make everything a little smarter and use more of our "free" solar energy.
We currently have 15KW of panels on our house and during Summer produce just under 100KW/h of solar per day. We use a number of tools to capture the data re solar performance and to then push this to Influx for storage and trending.
I am just in process of integrating the Solcast API into our system so we can get insights into how much power we are predicted to produce for upcoming days.
So we have a number of loads that we need to run on a daily basis - some we will call discretionary and others are "mandatory" - so for instance running the pool filter is not required every day but is a nice to have (we can get by with 3 days of no filter for instance with no noticeable difference in the water quality), whereas running the dishwasher everyday is required.
I am slowly building profiles of some of our loads (such as Washing machine, dishwasher and clothes dryer) to enable more fine grained control - but at the moment each of these has to be started manually - but can be interrupted - in the case of the washing machine, it will then require manual intervention to restart, whereas the clothes dryer and dishwasher will just continue on their way.
We will shortly be moving from Gas Hot water to Electric (run through the Solar) as well as moving from Gas Hydronic heating for the house to an Electric Heatpump.
So i am looking for ideas in how to implement an energy queueing and pool system to enable me to most effectively schedule our daily loads.
In my mind i have an idea of an "energy bucket" that various loads will be able to draw from based upon their "priority level" and their ability to be paused without intervention.
This energy bucket would be created overnight based on the output from the Solcast API for the next days Solar (and with maybe some looking further forward to following days) and would then either send emails to manually kick things off at certain times (such as a load of washing and then the dryer) or would automatically run certain loads (such as the Pool Cleaner, Pool Filter, Heat pump system, Reverse Cycle AC etc etc)
Anyone got any thoughts on the best way to start crafting something like this - or any magic nodes they have seen out there that might help ?
Craig