Home Assistant Integration: evcc☀️🚘- Solar Charging (unofficial)
I was surprised that it looks like that there does not exist a simple Home Assistant integration for the very popular evcc. So before my first EV spawned at my driveway, I wanted to contribute a very simple and basic integration that allows you to control evcc objects simply via the default HA gui and use sensors and switches in your automations.
Please note, that this Home Assistant integration is not official and not supported by the evcc developers. I am not affiliated with evcc in any way. This integration is based on the evcc API and the evcc API documentation.
Disclaimer
Please be aware that we are developing this integration to the best of our knowledge and belief, but can’t give a guarantee. Therefore, use this integration at your own risk.
Requirements
- A running & configured evcc instance in your network
- A Home Assistant instance that can reach your evcc instance
Main features
-
Supporting all evcc API-POST & DELETE requests (except POST /api/settings/telemetry/<status>) to adjust the evcc settings, loadpoints and the corresponding vehicles
- Loadpoint mode [Off, Solar, Min+Solar, Fast]
- Phases to use [Auto, 1p, 3p]
- Assign vehicles to loadpoints
- Configure min & max charging currents
- Configure cost limits (€ or CO₂)
- Adjust home-battery settings
- Adjust/create vehicle & loadpoint charging plan via HA-Services http://[YOUR-HA-INSTANCE]:8123/developer-tools/service
- Enable/eisable repeating charging plan #2-#10 per vehicle (details about the plan can be found in the attributes of the switch entity)
-
Supporting most of the other loadpoint and vehicle data that is available via the API – please let me know if you miss some data – probably it just slipped through my attention during testing.
evcc-Configuration objects are not supported
With the release of 0.3.x, evcc is now fully configurable via the graphical user interface (GUI). Since to be able to access the evcc-configuration GUI section requires a user authorization (for good reasons) is required, THIS INTEGRATION DOES NOT OFFER ANY ENTITIES OF THE CONFIGURATION SECTION of EVCC! Please don’t ask me to add them to this integration. There is no plan to support the evcc-configuration GUI entities in the future. This would require storing the evcc user credentials in the integration configuration, and the variety of possible objects is just too big.
If you want/need to adjust the evcc configuration via home assistant, make use of the HA-REST integration and create the required API calls yourself. Here in this readme you will find an example of what needs to be done.
Example Dashboard
Take a look at this sample Dashboard (showing Sensors from one load point):
Using evcc Custom Card (external repository)
@mkshb have created multiple custom cards that can be installed via HACS (or manually) that
will be a great enhancement for this integration. You can find all the details @ https://github.com/mkshb/hass-evcc-card.
Make sure, that you leave a GitHub star also at mkshb’s repostitory!
Installation
Before you start — there are two ‘tiny’ requirements!
- You must have installed & configured an evcc instance in your network. This can be either a stand-alone installation (e.g via Docker) or as a HASS-IO-AddOn[^1]. This AddOn is available via the official evcc hassio-addon repository.
- You must know the URL from which your HA-Instance can reach your evcc instance.
- This is usually the IP address of your evcc server and the port on which the evcc server is running (default is
7070).
- If you are using a reverse proxy, you need to know the URL that your HA instance can use to reach your evcc instance.
- When you are using docker (or docker-compose), you must ensure that the containers can communicate with each other. This means that the network and the port must be configured and exposed correctly. It’s not enough that you can reach your evcc instance via a browser — your HA container must be also able to reach it!
[^1]: There is a known issue when using HASS-IO - For whatever reason it has been reported that the startup sequence of the containers (the different installed AddOns) might not match the requirements of this Integration: Your evcc-server must be up and running before the Integration can be initialized in HA. This is because during the initial start of the Integration your evcc configuration (active loadpoints and configured vehicles) will be evaluated in order to create the corresponding HA entities.
So when you restart your HASS-IO server, it can happen that HA already starting to initialize this Integration before the HASS-OS has started the evcc-instance. This will lead to the situation that the Integration is not started correctly.
I am sorry that my HA developer skills are not sufficient to find a solution that works in this scenario – nor did I found other integrations with similar challenges (to find inspiration). If you know one (that’s actively maintained), please let me know. Of course, I am also open to any PR solving this issue for AddOn users that work in the different scenarios (deactivating/activating the integration, with WebSocket support and without).
As a personal note on this: IMHO restarts of HA Servers should only happen under observation, and should not be automated in any kind – but I might be alone with my opinion.
Step I: Install the integration
Option 1: via HACS
- Use the search bar and type
evcc☀️🚘- Solar Charging
- Use the 3-dots at the right of the list entry (not at the top bar!) to download/install the custom integration — the latest release version is automatically selected. Only select a different version if you have specific reasons.
- After you press download and the process has completed, you must Restart Home Assistant to install all dependencies
- Setup the evcc custom integration as described below (see Step II: Adding or enabling the integration)
Option 2: manual steps
- Using the tool of choice, open the directory (folder) for your HA configuration (where you find
configuration.yaml).
- If you do not have a
custom_components directory (folder) there, you need to create it.
- In the
custom_components directory (folder) create a new folder called evcc_intg.
- Download all the files from the
custom_components/evcc_intg/ directory (folder) in this repository.
- Place the files you downloaded in the new directory (folder) you created.
- Restart Home Assistant
- Setup the evcc custom integration as described below (see Step II: Adding or enabling the integration)
Step II: Adding or enabling the integration
You must have installed the integration (manually or via HACS before)!
Option 1: My Home Assistant (2021.3+)
Just click the following Button to start the configuration automatically (for the rest see Option 2: Manually steps by step):
Option 2: Manually — step by step
Use the following steps for a manual configuration by adding the custom integration using the web interface and follow instruction on screen:
- Go to
Configuration -> Integrations and add “evcc☀️🚘- Solar Charging” integration
Common further steps
- Provide a unique name for the integration installation (will be used in each sensor entity_id) created by the integration
- Provide the URL of your evcc web server (including the port) — e.g.
http://your-evcc-server-ip:7070
- [optional] Provide the area where the evcc installation is located
After the integration was added, you can use the ‘config’ button to adjust your settings, you can additionally modify the update interval
Please note that some of the available sensors are not enabled by default.
Understanding the different parts of evcc, Home Assistant and other additional components
It’s quite easy to mix up the things when it comes to issues with evcc and Home Assistant. It can be kind of tricky to understand which different components exist and what is the purpose of each of them. And where you should open an issue or start a discussion in case of a problem or which developer you want to support.
The evcc (Server) component
The evcc main component, a server (implemented in go), serving an own GUI that have implemented interfaces to wallboxes, batteries, meters, vehicles and probably many other devices that exist in your home. Evcc is completely independent of anything that is happening in Home Assistant.
Have that said, evcc can also read data from your Home Assistance instance, in this case HA is the source for some data used by evcc. So in this case HA can be considered just like any other interface implemented in evcc as data source.
The simplest way to run evcc is via docker (IMHO) - but you can of course also install and run it alternatively.
The evcc HA (hassio) AddOn/App component
When you are using the Home Assistant hassio (OS), then you have the possibility to install/run additional conatiners as Apps (named Addons in the past). The evcc AddOn/App_ allow you to install & run an instance of the evcc server directly as addon/app in your HA hassio. So there is no need, that you install a separate instance of evcc (e.g. in a docker container).
Running the App/Addon will typically add an entry to the left navigation of your running HA and will show the default user interface of evcc (GUI) in a frame of your Home Assistant.
So evcc Server or evcc HA (hassio) AddOn/App are the components that you must install in order to have an evcc instance up and running. A running evcc server can access HA entities and read values from different HA entities (as data source for evcc). How all this can be done is part of the evcc.io documentation.
The HA integration (this repository)
When you run your evcc Server (or Addon/App) there is no possibility to systematically interact e.g. via automations from HA with your evcc server.
This gap will be filled by this evcc HA integration. Most (if not all) of the controls that exists in the evcc GUI will be provided as HA entities (selects, switches, buttons or sensors). This allows you to control any evcc option/setting via HA automations or other types of scripting.
The HA integration can be considered as some sort of remote control of your evcc server inside the ecosystem of Home Assistant. I hope it’s obviously to be able to use this HA integration you must have previously installed an evcc Server or the Addon/App.
The evcc custom HA card component
A custom Lovelace card for Home Assistant that provides a comprehensive Home Assistant dashboard for evcc - using the evcc HA integration. Since the default HA controls have certain limitations, the custom card brings you the (look &) feel from the evcc GUI into your HA.
Using evcc with Home Assistant
Please see the separate document where you can find examples how to provide your evcc instance with HA sensor data.
Use evcc to control any of your Home Assistant devices
This is IMHO a very powerful feature of evcc, that is not known to many users (yet). You can use evcc to control your Home Assistant devices or Automation, e.g., to switch on/off anything you like when you are actually feeding power into the grid.
Using the maximum out of your solar panels to charge your EV is great, but what if you have more power available — or if your EV is already fully charged? I am facing this challenge for quite a long time now and used several helpers & Blueprints to control my home devices with larger energy consumption.
You can use evcc to control any Home Assistant entity that has implemented the turn_on and turn_off services. This means you can control devices like smart plugs, or even Home Assistant automations (which is IMHO the door to PV surplus handling heaven).
Since the setup and configuration of this evcc feature might not be straight forward, I have created a separate document where you can find examples Master PV surplus handling with evcc & Home Assistent.
I use this feature to control the hot-water temperature of my waterkotte heat pump.
Are you are go-eCharger V3 (or higher) User?
Do you know, that as owners of a go-eCharger (V3+) there is no need to use evcc for solar surplus charging? Even without any additional hardware! Home Assistant and the go-eCharger APIv2 Connect Integration is all you need. Get all details from https://github.com/marq24/ha-goecharger-api2.
Want to report an issue?
Please use the GitHub Issues for reporting any issues you encounter with this integration. Please be so kind before creating a new issues, check the closed ones if your problem has been already reported (& solved).
To speed up the support process, you might like to already prepare and provide DEBUG log output. In the case of a technical issue, I would need this DEBUG log output to be able to help/fix the issue. There is a short tutorial/guide ‘How to provide DEBUG log’ here — please take the time to quickly go through it.
For this integration, you need to add:
logger:
default: warning
logs:
custom_components.evcc_intg: debug
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References
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