@majordennisbloodnok 

Success!!!

I have a couple of questions about the cards going forward which are:

1- if we change tariff from agile to say an EV one (But still with Octopus) would the card automatically update with the new rates? 

2- if that is the case, am I correct in thinking that changing the title of the card would be as simple as replacing agile in the title line of the code?

Many thanks

@johndunlop, I’ve never changed tariff since installing the cards but yes, I believe they would just keep working. In fact, it must do because I have an agile export tariff and you're showing a fixed one. All the card is doing is showing what the Octopus API sends out, and presumably you could use the card to show gas prices too - I think I saw you had three Octopus devices, so I'm assuming the third is a gas tariff.

As for changing the title, yes it’s as simple as that.

Well done; that looks great. I’ll have a quick think about next step and post shortly.

OK, a quick bit of a recap now, and time also to put things in context.

@editor mentioned right at the beginning of this thread that my articles on home automation might be of some use, and it's worth having a quick scan back through them, particularly the third and fourth.

1. Are You Getting the Most Out of Your Renewable Energy? – Renewable Heating Hub
2. Choosing a Home Automation System – Renewable Heating Hub
3. Integrating Devices with Home Assistant: A Step-by-Step Guide – Renewable Heating Hub
4. Maximising Home Automation: Integrating Octopus Energy & More – Renewable Heating Hub

Basically, rereading the articles you should now find it's all familiar territory to you up to about halfway through the last one. That's how far you've come already, and that's not a small thing. The only thing we haven't really touched on is automations and that, I think, is our next step.

As a prerequisite, however, I need to get a wee bit of information. Looking back to page 2 of this thread, you posted a screenshot of your "Home" tab of your Solar & Electricity dashboard. On there, you had a couple of cards related to the GivTCP integration. Now, I don't know anything about GivEnergy inverters and batteries so whilst I understand the buttons, toggles, sliders, dropdowns and so forth I don't know what they actually do. So my question is whether or not you know how to use those controls to manually tell the battery to start or stop charging from the grid?

If the answer's yes, we can create an automation for it. If the answer's no, we'll need the input from other forum members to find out the steps. The aim I'm thinking of is to create two simple automations; one that looks to see if the agile import price has gone negative and then start charging the battery and one that's the reverse (if the import price goes from negative to positive, tell the battery to stop charging from grid). If you can do it manually, you can automate it, hence my asking how well you understand the inverter and battery.

Perhaps now is a good time for me to contribute; I have a Givenergy All-In-One.  As I believe you know, I am presently using Predbat with Home Assistant.  However, before I got that up and running I started with GivEnergy's app, which I was able to use in its ECO mode very effectively.  I started to use GivTCP but quickly found myself in a bit of a pickle because the GivTCP controls didn't work as I expected them to.  The solution to my problem came by using the 'shortcut' controls in the app then looking in the inverter logs to see what the app controls were converted to at inverter level.  If those steps are replicated in GivTCP then it is possible to control the inverter at a 'low level'. The log can be found (as 'Remote Control History') on the Givenergy Cloud Portal for your installation at the bottom of the Remote Control page for your inverter.

@majordennisbloodnok and those following this thread.

Apologies for the long post in advance...

I am not too sure what any of the background things do. Since getting the system, I have been using the GE app with eco mode enabled continuously. I started just using the 1 slot for charging that was provided in the GE app then tried octopus r&d labs (really unreliable as to if it would take a charge partially or at all!) and quickly figured out that this was not the most cost effective way of charging so went looking for other solutions in order to get more charging slots.

The Giv Tcp install? was just a 'casualty' of trying to follow the speak to the geek you tube video for HA, Agile, GivEnergy and Solcast integration without understanding what was going on before subsequently asking for help but the long and short of it is that I'm sorry to say I still don't know what it is.

I liked the idea of HA because the FB groups said you could configure the HA to enable the cheapest agile charging slots after taking into account the predicted solar forecast with solcast (which we have found to be spookily accurate) against your average daily consumption thus minimising the import at the lowest prices with buffer percentages of course.

Upon interacting with the FB groups, there appeared to be an awful lot of "if you can't use it, you shouldn't be trying" as opposed to offering pointers and as you rightly pointed out, we all had to start somewhere! So I have been using wonderwatt for the Agile schedules and prices but there are no adjustments for predicted solar and a subscription model has just been introduced which I completely understand but don't necessarily want to be subscribing to in perpetuity.

We have just had a new to us EV delivered today (Volvo EX30 S/M ER - not IOG compatible) and have a zappi (which i understand is IOG compatible and therefore qualifies for the tariff not the car) being installed shortly so with a change of tariff coming (IOG) hopefully, subject to Octopus playing ball, my initial needs might have changed slightly but most definitely not my desire and enthusiasm to understand and utilise HA.

The EV charger will be hidden from the home battery setup but I would still like to be able to schedule charges for the battery vs solar forecast as described above. 

Also since setting out on this adventure we have had the Mitsubishi A/C units installed for health reasons which I won't bore you with here and I would like to automate them to come on to cool the house if the temperature reaches X degrees C which has become quite important. It was awesome to follow your instructions on setting up the HACS and custom integration for the AC and this has vastly improved my knowledge from nothing to very limited!! and also improve on the clunky smart-m-air app which I suppose is the whole point of using HA.

This is not by any means a wish list because I am really enjoying the learning process that I am going through and I think the more you know and understand, the easier it is to use and make HA work for you, its more like a status update.

I will revisit your articles in the links you have kindly provided but today has proved more than a little hectic!

In summary, my knowledge is poor but enthusiasm to learn is high

@johndunlop, I understand very well and it's certainly a pity many on the FB groups take an attitude like that. I think this thread has demonstrated already that "if you can't use it but get a wee bit of direction then everything's open to you and so you SHOULD be trying". Despite your assertion your knowledge is poor, you've gone from ground zero to a pretty comprehensive HA setup with only a few forum posts to guide you.

I'm still convinced starting on an automation or two is the next sensible step and, in fact, is the only significant missing link. However, given what you've said about the health issues making automated A/C control important, I think it's well worth changing tack to have a look at that instead. That does put me on a bit of a learning curve, though, so it'd be good if you could explain to me a little more about the aircon units. I was under the impression you basically tell them the temperature you want the house to be and they'd do their stuff automatically to maintain that set constant temperature. However, your saying you'd like to automate them to come on suggests the operation isn't quite as user-friendly as that. Assuming you've added the units to one of your dashboards, is it possible to share some screenshots?

As an aside, your getting an EV is very interesting, but the Zappi even more so. I've got a Zappi too, and it's plumbed into HA as well so there's quite a bit we can do there too. One thing at a time, though; let's get those A/C units working to your liking first.

@majordennisbloodnok 

I am very conscious of not wanting to appear pushy or ungrateful because I really do appreciate your time and guidance and don't want to interfere with a structured plan.

An automation would be great and as you said, a logical next step.

We have a slightly quirky setup at home because the PV, battery and AC have been retrofitted by us with the zappi scheduled to be fitted on the 13th November.

The general heating and hot water is via a combi gas boiler and the heating controlled with hive zoned thermostats (1 upstairs and 1 downstairs - only a small 2 bed semi) I will have another go at making the integration work but to be fair the app isn't too bad.

The AC split system (4.5kw outdoor main unit, 3.5kw mini split downstairs and 2.5kw upstairs) were fitted only for cooling mainly in the summer but with the bonus side effect of heating and dehumidification too.

So my idea was that I might be able to set up an automation that utilises the sensors in the indoor units to say if the downstairs indoor temperature reaches 25 degrees C then turn on the unit in cooling mode to bring it down to 18 degrees C (its lowest setting) or for X amount of time/turn off at a set time. The timer can only be used on the handheld remote at the moment and doesn't appear to be an option in the HA device card.

When using the heating mode, it does seem to switch on and off in order to maintain a temperature so that would suggest it's thermostatically controlled.

Our battery is only 9.5kw and daily house usage is 7.5kw with a 3.6kw hybrid inverter, so when I purchased the AC units, a average running load of <1kw was specified in order to not munch up too much of the spare battery capacity but obviously if the sun is shining when it's most likely to be warm, the PV (3.3kw) more than takes care of it all. Being a relatively new build house though with mad levels of insulation, it can get really hot when cooking even with doors and windows open.

I have screenshots of the card and device info as you requested

Many thanks 

Posted by: @johndunlop

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@majordennisbloodnok 

I am very conscious of not wanting to appear pushy or ungrateful because I really do appreciate your time and guidance and don't want to interfere with a structured plan.

An automation would be great and as you said, a logical next step.

...

@johndunlop, please don't worry. You are coming across as neither of those things and you've been very generous with your appreciation, so I thank you.

I also have to say that you're not interfering with a structured plan either. I recognise that there are certain key functions within HA that we all need to be aware of in order to use it to its full potential, and they are the ability to connect to various devices, the ability to read values from those devices, the ability to update values on those devices and the ability to automate the carrying out of actions based on logical criteria. I've already seen you get to grips with all of those except the automation, and to my mind as soon as you know something's possible in HA then the "how do I actually do it" is just a matter of research and asking. However, if you don't know one of HA's capabilities then you don't even know to ask. My only reason, therefore, for suggesting we move towards a simple automation is to help you gain familiarity with that last key point.

...

We have a slightly quirky setup at home because the PV, battery and AC have been retrofitted by us with the zappi scheduled to be fitted on the 13th November.

...

Apart from the fact you have AC instead of a heat pump, you're pretty much exactly describing our home too. All retrofit.

...

The general heating and hot water is via a combi gas boiler and the heating controlled with hive zoned thermostats (1 upstairs and 1 downstairs - only a small 2 bed semi) I will have another go at making the integration work but to be fair the app isn't too bad.

...

Do you mean an integration for the hive thermostats? If so, I agree; well worth another go to try to bring it into the HA fold. No point in having several apps if it's not necessary.

...

The AC split system (4.5kw outdoor main unit, 3.5kw mini split downstairs and 2.5kw upstairs) were fitted only for cooling mainly in the summer but with the bonus side effect of heating and dehumidification too.

So my idea was that I might be able to set up an automation that utilises the sensors in the indoor units to say if the downstairs indoor temperature reaches 25 degrees C then turn on the unit in cooling mode to bring it down to 18 degrees C (its lowest setting) or for X amount of time/turn off at a set time. The timer can only be used on the handheld remote at the moment and doesn't appear to be an option in the HA device card.

When using the heating mode, it does seem to switch on and off in order to maintain a temperature so that would suggest it's thermostatically controlled.

...

Although there may be some entities related to your AC unit that deal with timing, I wouldn't worry too much about that. There's always the option for handling timing in HA, but I suspect if you need to use HA to start the unit up in cooling mode then better to let the unit continue thermostatically controlling itself at that point. You can always have another automation to deal with when you want to take the unit back out of cooling mode so that starting and stopping the thing are independent decisions which is probably not a bad thing in itself.

Do you remember when I gave you instructions to go to the developer page and find the names of the Octopus entities? It may well be worth doing something similar (going to that page and filtering to get a list of all the AC entities) and screenshotting the list so we can see all the different bits of info we've got at our disposal, hidden or obvious. Once we know what we can do with the AC, we'll be in a good position to decide what we should do and how to achieve it.

...

Our battery is only 9.5kw and daily house usage is 7.5kw with a 3.6kw hybrid inverter, so when I purchased the AC units, a average running load of <1kw was specified in order to not munch up too much of the spare battery capacity but obviously if the sun is shining when it's most likely to be warm, the PV (3.3kw) more than takes care of it all. Being a relatively new build house though with mad levels of insulation, it can get really hot when cooking even with doors and windows open.

I have screenshots of the card and device info as you requested

Many thanks 

Thanks for the screenshots; that's already helpful.

And I'll leave you with a reminder that if it feels I'm heading you off in a direction you don't want to go yet then please just shout. This is all about you learning, not me teaching.

@majordennisbloodnok 

Here are the screenshots that I think you needed:-

The entities are back to front ie climate upstairs are using "downstairs" named entities because when I put them in, I had a 50/50 chance of naming them correctly and you've guessed it!! I managed to change the name of the unit so the dashboard control is correct but have been unable to change the entities.

Thanks, @johndunlop, and apologies for the delay in replying.

I understand how the aircon system deals thermostatic maintaining of a constant temperature when heating, but not entirely sure how it works when cooling. I'd like to hope it works in the same way and the Smart M-Air app manual suggests so but I guess we'll need to experiment to be sure. I'd like you to do something very straightforward and hopefully that'll give you the bare bones that you can build on.

If you go to your Settings page, then select Automations & Scenes, this will bring you to a screen I'm not sure you've seen before. However, a lot will be familiar and, in particular, the fact that adding a new automation is a case of clicking the blue "Create Automation" button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. In the dialogue box that pops up, I'd like you to select "Create new automation" - the top choice. This will change the screen to one you may have seen if you looked through my last article, but in essence it has three sections:

1. When. The automation will listen out for specific events to occur and the "When" section here is where we define those triggers i.e. "When this happens...."
2. And if. Even if the "When" event occurs, you may also want to check other conditions are met (e.g. when the temperature goes above x degC (the "when") AND if the aircon unit is turned off (the "and if" check).
3. Then do. This is what happens if the "when" event happens and the "and if" conditions are met.

What I'd like you to do first is to click on the "Add Action" button in the "Then do" section, then select the Climate option. Within there, I'd like you to select the "Set target temperature" option. This will bring you back to the "new automation" screen but with something added to the "then do" section. From there you can select "choose entity" and pick one of your aircon units from the dropdown list. You will now be able to tick a "Temperature" tickbox and put in a target temperature (let's pick 18). You should also below that line be able to tick an "HVAC mode" tickbox and select "Cool" from the dropdown list.

At this point, you can click the blue "save" button and this will return you to the screen that lists all the automations. In the saving process it'll ask you to name the automation, so give it a name of "HVAC Test" for the moment.

What you've now done is create an automation that's not looking out for any triggers and not checking any conditions. If you run the automation manually it will simply go straight to the "then do" section, set the aircon unit's target temperature to 18degC and turn the aircon's mode to "cool". Running the automation manually is simply a matter of going to the three vertical dots at the end of that automation's line, clicking on them and selecting "run". If you run the automation this way and then go to your Aircon page you should see the card there reflecting the changes the automation has carried out, and if you go to the physical aircon unit you should be able to feel the cool air being kicked out.

Obviously, you can turn the aircon unit back to its previous operation mode as you normally do anyway, then you can come back to the automations and click on HVAC Test to look into it again. Now you've successfully created your first automation, you can start defining when you'd like to set that target temperature and set the aircon to "cool". You were suggesting earlier that you'd like to do something like that when the indoor temperature reaches 25degC, so you can go to the "When" section, click "Add trigger" and then select Entity --> Numeric state. This will bring you back to the HVAC Test details page with something now added to the "When" section. Click on the dropdown to select the entity (start typing climate and it should narrow things down a bit), then in the "Above mode" section leave "fixed number" selected and type 25 into the grey box containing the word "above". Click the "Save" button and you're done.

This has now updated HVAC Test so that whenever the aircon unit's current temperature goes above 25degC the automation will be triggered and HA will tell the aircon to reset its target temperature to 18degC and tell the aircon to go into "cool" mode.

Obviously, you're likely to want to add several more automations for different scenarios and you'll want to think carefully about when you want things to happen. However, this is a demonstration of how to create one automation and should give you enough insight for you to start getting quite inventive. Oh, and if you look at the automations page, you can see there's a blue toggle button on the right hand side of each automation's line; that allows you to disable or enable an automation easily.

@majordennisbloodnok 

Awesome, thank you for the very clear explanation. It seemed too simple when following your instructions but is working like a charm!!

Checked the AC card as you suggested and that showed as on and working with a temperature of 18* and the downstairs unit was pumping out cold air.

I have also set up the second part with a threshold temperature and target as per the HVAC Test.

Brilliant.

So to recap, what that now means is that, within Home Assistant:

• You can install new integrations
• If you can't find the integration you need, you can trawl t'interweb a bit to find if someone's written a custom integration and then install that using HACS.
• Use the integrations to connect, where appropriate, to stuff in your house on your home network.
• Use the integrations to connect, where appropriate, to web services (APIs and so forth).
• Use the devices found by your integrations to add cards to your dashboards so you can see what's going on and, where appropriate, interact with those devices (buttons, toggles, sliders and all sorts of fun stuff).
• Create and edit automations so you can perform actions on some of your kit according to logic you want to implement (if such and such happens and this thing is in this state then do that).

With those building blocks there's very little you can't now achieve; it's just a matter now of practice to build up the experience and familiarity, and creativity to spot how to exploit all this. Just a few pointers that might give you a head start:

• You will be able to add your Volvo EX30 to Home Assistant using the Volvo On Call - Home Assistant integration. No idea how extensive the functionality is but there's plenty to be getting started.
• Your Zappi will need you to install the GitHub - CJNE/ha-myenergi: Home Assistant integration for MyEnergi devices custom integration using HACS.
• There's lots of stuff you can kick off in an automation by looking at the sensor.octopus_energy_electricity_21j00xxxxx_190000xxxxxxx_current_rate entity, and especially using whether it goes above or below zero as a trigger.
• There are plenty of ways you can add your and your family's smart phones to Home Assistant, several of which will allow HA to see the phones' locations. Since you also have your home's location you can set triggers for when phones leave home or return home. Turn off all the lights if everyone's phone leaves home? It's possible (although what CAN be done and what SHOULD be done aren't always the same thing).
• All the more commonly recognised "smart home" tech can be incorporated into HA too; security cameras, smart plugs, smart doorbells, smart lights and so on.

I think now is a good time for me to step back and suggest you've learned all I'd want to introduce you to. Now you've had the introductions it's over to you to start exploring in anger and ask questions whenever there's something you think should be possible but you're not sure how to achieve it.

I look forward too to you posting updates of what you've put in place. Good luck.