Hey Dr Warm, did you ever build the NodeRED integration? I built mine for HomeAssistant. Happy to share.
How anyone compared power club with amber? What im confused about is the $10 per month to access the wholesale rates is this included as part of your daily service charge?
What im confused about is the $10 per month to access the wholesale rates is this included as part of your daily service charge?
yes it is included as part of the daily fee when you check their rates. On my bill the $10 a month is a separate line though.
Ok I just checked and compared to powerclub .... ambers daily charge is 94 c for my area....if I factor into the 39 bucks per year Power club charges the daily rate is 93c so its essentially the same. The only annoying thing about PC is the powerbank...
Am I missing any other savings using amber vs PC?
I am very interested in this – i have found a basic integration in HA – but it does not seem to be using the authenticated APIs – did you go down that route as well or have you use the Yaleman Python Code ?
I am not a python programmer (not really a programmer at all) but have been using Node Red for a long while and started recently with Home Assistant
regards
Craig
did you go down that route as well or have you use the Yaleman Python Code ?
I went down the route of non authentication api plus my ToU costs to get my real kWh costs, currently amber doesn't provide ToU rates.
I query the api every 5 mind via node red and base my scripts off that figure.
A really good companion to Amber is the PowerPal meter reader.
Usually like $120 but they're doing them for free (with install too i think)
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/goto/549388
Basically, it's a small smart meter reader that send real time and historic data via Bluetooth to your phone/app.
It allows you to see exactly how much instantaneous power you are using, very useful for seeing specific individual item draw, and best of all, you can learn your usage habits with some pretty cool graphs from the saved data.
Still waiting for Amber integration (right now the set prices are only for peak/off peak and shoulder) but with that coming, live pricing will be amazing in it!
I've been waiting a couple weeks. Surprised there is a long queue
I signed up to their waiting list in January and finally got my invite last week (in SA).
A really good companion to Amber is the PowerPal meter reader.
This has its own thread here
Not ideal to integrate with solar production as I understand it since it is consumption only. Anyway all that is discussed in that Powerpal thread and won’t be exclusive to Amber as such.
I've written a handy interface to pull data from Amber's realtime pricing API and publish it to an MQTT broker for easy integration into a home automation system:
https://github.com/tjhowse/amber_to_mqtt
https://i.imgur.com/I0W5z7F.png
I haven't finished running the numbers to determine whether it'll be worthwhile to switch to Amber, but it's very kind of them to provide access to their API. They haven't given me the go-ahead to distribute their API URL but a quick email to their support folk should sort that out.
thanks for this – i had just finished writing a flow in NR to grab the same data and was just manipulating etc now.
I had found a number of other python projects out on the net but no one who had anything to show in NR
I am going to push it from NR into Grafana and also to a Home Assistant Dashboard
Craig
no not really – their rates seem to be pretty much around the 15c to 17c per KWH – with occasional spikes in the early evening 5-6PM into the 22c-46c range.
These prices are taken from their phone app
My understanding is these prices include everything except the $10/month fee that they charge.
If you are a big electric user these will save you a substantial amount of money.
Both my wife and i work from home (not COVID related) i am in IT and she is an accountant so we have a high baseload all day – our solar is sucked up by that (we never export to the grid with our old 5kw system) and i have automated our high use items during the day to take advantage of solar and reasonable lower tarrifs.
We were previously with Red Energy and prior to that AGL and on a smart TOU meter – we had moved a lot of our heavy useage (dishwasher, washing machine, clothes dryer, pool pump) to the offpeak rates – so over 60% of our useage was at off[peak – but even so that rate was up around 16c last i remember checking. Our shoulder was 24c and peak was 49c
So to us this will be a big winner. Once i have everythign automated (so say an email at 5pm to say what is looking like the best time to set the dishwasher overnight), what time to put a load of washing on, dryer etc we will be well ahead – i already have the pool pump automated through Node-red so it comes on in ½ hour increments during the day depending on the wholesale price, the price forecast for overnight and how much solar we are producing
A battery would be a great addition to the system, charge at the lowest times of the day, then kick it in for the high points such as cooking dinner etc
Craig