Alternative to drive on sunshine ( excess solar charging with evcc.io )

[Infinus]

Drive on Sunshine is great for those with powerwalls. For those that didn't have powerwalls chargeHQ was a good alternative but now you have to pay $7 a month to utilize the solar charging feature. There are a few scripts out there on GitHub that allow this but I was hoping for something a little more polished.

After much searching I stumbled across evcc.io which I haven't really seen discussed much in the community. The documentation is mostly in German but using the translate feature I was able to get through it and set up my Tesla to dynamically charge from excess solar output communicating to my Enphase gateway.

Setup has a guided configuration which helps if you don't want to compose the yaml file yourself.

It supports Tesla as well as many other vehicles, connects with the wall charger and uses Tesla refresh tokens to connect to the vehicle and it all stays local on your machine for those that don't like to share auto tokens to external services.

Has anyone else set this up?

 

[phsoccer]

I use Stats. It works, but requires lots of intervention and you have to turn it on everyday when you are ready. The intervention is manually setting how much power your house will be using and adjusting it as the day goes. It is also not free

 

[[Zombie]]

Has anyone else set this up?

I've been playing with this the last couple of days.

The major stumbling block is that evcc expects to see a Gen3 Tesla Wall Connector for charging status and charge rate. Everything else is done via the Tesla API.

I don't have a Gen3, but it was easy enough to fake the output from one.

evcc thinks it's talking to a wall connector, but it's really talking to a very small Perl script that runs on my webserver and pulls the info from Teslamate (via MQTT)

 

[Infinus]

I use Stats. It works, but requires lots of intervention and you have to turn it on everyday when you are ready. The intervention is manually setting how much power your house will be using and adjusting it as the day goes. It is also not free

I used to do something similar but the power swings are too frequent due to having two ac units. I also like to have it as fully close to my set charging level as I never know when the wife will plan to take it somewhere.

 

[Infinus]

I've been playing with this the last couple of days.

The major stumbling block is that evcc expects to see a Gen3 Tesla Wall Connector for charging status and charge rate. Everything else is done via the Tesla API.

I don't have a Gen3, but it was easy enough to fake the output from one.

evcc thinks it's talking to a wall connector, but it's really talking to a very small Perl script that runs on my webserver and pulls the info from Teslamate (via MQTT)

I thought it only used the connection to the WC to see if you were home or not to know if it should throttle charging and actual charge rate was pulled and set from the API. If I change to guest vehicle it shows connected but says “vehicle not capable of current control” meaning it has no api connection the the “guest” car. If it was charger controlled I would still be able to set a charge rate via the charger would I not?

 

[[Zombie]]

I thought it only used the connection to the WC to see if you were home or not to know if it should throttle charging and actual charge rate was pulled and set from the API

It pulls the charge rate from the wall connector.
This information is also available from the car API but when I modify the code to pull that info it gets ignored, so I suspect the evcc design expects that information to only come from the charger.

It's why I created a fake wall connector to provide that info to evcc via my webserver.

If it was charger controlled I would still be able to set a charge rate via the charger would I not?

The gen3 wall connector charge rate can't be adjusted on the fly, which is why evcc uses the API for that.