Power Play

Many manufacturers of solar panels, EV charging stations, home batteries, and heat pumps offer their own energy management systems. However, these systems often have limited device support and operate via a cloud system that involves subscription fees. Moreover, it simply doesn't make sense for an EV charger and a home battery that are both in your house to require a remote server to communicate with each other. If you don't like the idea of paying to lock yourself into one vendor's support universe (and submitting to the spying that tends to comes with web-based management), an alternative is evcc [1], an open source energy management system that you can run on a Raspberry Pi or in Docker. Evcc works entirely locally without cloud dependency or subscription fees.

The evcc project supports a variety of EV chargers, electric cars, solar inverters, home batteries, energy meters, smart plugs, and heat pumps from different manufacturers. This article describes how to use evcc to monitor and manage electrical devices in your home. If you're not ready for evcc yet, just wait: You might be in a few years. And, even if this doesn't describe your own home environment, this information could be useful in informing a friend. It is good to know that the open source community is already working on solutions for today's newest technologies.

Before beginning with evcc, consult the documentation [2] to confirm your device compatibility. Even if there isn't direct support, you can often integrate devices via the MQTT IoT messaging protocol, an HTTP API, or Modbus (a protocol for industrial devices over a serial interface).

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