Another (not so) minor request. Feel free to ignore until you have time!
Could you find a way to make entering the rate schedule more painless? Best would be to crowd-source the work. For instance, at a minimum, allow importing & exporting CSV or XML or whatever so that Tessie users can share with each other. Or have it shareable (look-up-able) on the Tessie app itself and even automatically suggest the correct rate schedule automatically based on the vehicle's charging location. People move or rate schedules change over time and not everyone is on top of all the changes. This gives us an opportunity to share the work and make your customers happier on an on-going basis without requiring much (additional/on-going) work on your end.
I admit it's a selfish request because I dread entering the rate schedule so much, it's still blank. Problem is: besides the normal complications of:
- Difference between Peak, Partial-Peak, Off-Peak times
- Difference between Weekday vs Weekend vs Holiday
- Difference between Summer and Winter
On top of that, PG&E still hasn't caught-up to 2007 and this adds another wrinkle because there's a:
- Difference between the old daylight savings time and new daylight savings time (No one I talked to so far, including neighbors, friends, solar companies, and even representatives of my my own utility provider even know about this) PG&E schedule says: "DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME ADJUSTMENT: The time periods shown above will begin and end one hour later for the period between the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in April, and for the period between the last Sunday in October and the first Sunday in November." Source
On top of ALL OF THAT, I have yet another set of complications:
- I buy power from my county's supplier (Peninsula Clean Energy - PCE), but it gets delivered by PG&E. The bill comes from PG&E and includes generation costs and then a generation credit, and it's 110% impossible to fully figure out the actual $/kWh rate.
- I have a separate meter for EV-charging only and I have to pay a fixed monthly meter charge and some other fees. It would be nice to be able to "amortize" that over all the energy (kWh) consumed that month. <== I'll admit this may be asking way too much!
Okay.. Rant over. I'm not even sure Tessie can handle the weird daylight savings black-hole during those extra 2+2 weeks each year. I certainly haven't seen it handled anywhere. For over a decade, I have to set all of my Teslas' charging schedules 1 hour later because I can't remember which of the 2 weeks I need to set it 1 hour back and which one I need to set it 1 hour forward... it's insane. And whenever I complain to anyone, people just stare at me blankly. I guess I wouldn't mind putting in the work to enter it if I know it can benefit more people than just myself - gives me some motivation.
I noticed Tessie seems to allow overlapping rate schedules... Does it just "add-up" the rates of all the schedules that overlap for a particular time? And maybe the schedule period month needs more granularity besides whole months and need those "1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, & last + day-of-week" options to define daylight-savings-based time periods.