I need some assistant to set this up as I’m not entirely clear how to do this or how it works.
Background:
Charge HQ is a web based service which automatically and remotely controls EV charge stations.
It polls data from solar PV inverters (or their web services) along with other available home energy parameters, and depending on how the ChargeHQ service is configured by the user it manages the charging of the car accordingly - ramping up and down the charge rate, turning the charger on and off etc.
In my case it is set to use excess solar PV only (unless I manually override that) and to avoid importing energy from the grid. Some leakage from the grid is inevitable/acceptable but one can set some thresholds to minimise this.
At present it polls data from our solar PV inverter’s online service, Fronius Solarweb, and while it works OK it has two main flaws:
- it’s infrequent (updates every 1-2 minutes)
- it’s using a snapshot of power values at that moment, rather than a filtered value such as a rolling average power over the past minute or so. IOW if a cloud floats overhead right when it polls, then it thinks our excess solar has been killed when really it’s just a transient event.
As a result, the way it adjusts charging can be suboptimal and cause issues with my other load management automations, in particular the charging of our home battery.
Accordingly I want to improve the performance of the service by sending it relevant filtered data directly and more frequently.
Proposed solution:
Charge HQ has a Push API which users are free to use.
There is one suggested for use with Home Assistant:
Assistance needed:
I’ve been trying to understand how to use this yaml code.
I understand I need to substitute in my API Key, and all the relevant sensors for the default placeholders.
My questions are:
-
Where would this yaml go?
configurations.yaml? -
Do I need to run an automation, or does this just run itself, performing a POST to the Charge HQ website every 30 seconds?
I don’t really understand how/why this is a binary sensor.
My understand of such things is rudimentary so any help is appreciated.
Many thanks.
I note this is similar to a code solution posted in this other thread.
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