PVControl

An application to optimize (external) energy usage by monitoring and predicting battery SoC, houseload and PV charge. It tries to always keep the battery SoC over the defined minima by checking if there will be enough PV charge or otherwise instruct to charge the battery at the cheapest times. PVControl itself doesn't do anything but calculate the different entity states. You have to use the provided information and use automations to take advantage of this.

Entities which should be used in automations

sensor.pv_control_mode

This is the main information and has 3 possible values:

• "normal": normal operation, nothing special is happening
• "force_charge": instruct your inverter to charge the battery from grid. According to the prediction it's not possible to keep the SoC over the minima and now is the cheapest period to charge
• "grid_only": use as much grid power as possible (disable PV, charge the battery, use only grid power). This is only active if energy prices are negative, depending on your tarif you could even be paying for feedin

sensor.pv_control_run_heavyloads_now

This sensor tells if it's a good time to use heavy loads now (washing machine, dishwasher, heatpump, etc) and also has 3 possible values:

• "Yes": use all the load you want, the battery will get full via PV charge
• "IfNecessary": only use needed loads, the battery won't reach 100% SoC but also will not go down to your preferred minima
• "No": try to avoid using loads, as it's predicted that the battery SoC will go under absolute minima

Entities which could be used in automations

binary_sensor.pv_control_need_to_charge_from_grid_today

This sensor just tells if it's necessary to charge the battery from grid today or if we can keep the SoC over the absolute minima until the next PV period

Option entities

select.pv_control_mode_override

Allows to manually override the current mode

number.pv_control_preferredbatterycharge

The preferred minimal battery SoC, used as a lower limit for "pv_control_run_heavyloads_now"-"IfNecessary"

switch.pv_control_enforce_preferred_soc

If active the application will keep the SoC always over the preferred SoC by charging from grid if necessary. Comparable to the "Backup Mode" of most inverters.

switch.pv_control_force_charge_at_cheapest_period

If active the system will charge everday at the lowest price even if it wouldn't be necessary to keep the SoC over the minima

number.pv_control_max_price_for_forcecharge

Only force charge at cheapest price if the price is below this value

number.pv_control_forcecharge_target_soc

Don't charge over this SoC when force_charging in cheapest period_

Info entities

Most of the other provided entities are just for information and are only relevant if you're a stickler for information overload like myself

Entity attributes

all sensors have edditional information in the attributes, which again can be ignored

Prediction

Class to encapsulate different predictions and forecasts. For the load there only is a (weighted) average prediction available for now, but the logged data is meant to use some sort of ML/AI to predict the load more efficiently.

DataLogger

This part logs the most important sensor information into a sqlite db to use for prediction.