Octopus Home Mini now installed & running in Home Assistant, showing live consumption figure & history:
More energy monitoring smart plugs on order - addictive stuff this.
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cooool, which smart plugs are you planning to get?
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Kasa KP115’s. I use 4 and need another 2
They’re great. They come with their own app but can also be controlled by Google Home and by Home Assistant. The combination of power monitoring via the KP115’s on certain devices/areas and off-peak electricity slot monitoring is proving to be quite the money saver.
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Welp, that’s even more data added to my life haha.
I had no idea my PC was using 100 watts while on standby (mostly the monitors I think), so I’ve automated it to switch off the socket when it detects that its on standby.
TV console is not so bad at 4 watts on standby, but I’ve automated it to switch off all the same. I now have a hue switch that we use to set the living room up for watching movies (turns the TV on, sets the lights appropriately).
I think my next project will be to set up phone notifications for when the washing machine and dryer finish their cycles.
Do you have any interesting automations on the go?
Super interesting - now I’m with Octopus and both my smart meters are properly registering I’m keen to get more involved with my data.
Does the Octopus Mini hub allow you to export your data somewhere - or do you have a clever tip to get your smart meter data accessible for analysis elsewhere?
I keep seeing the Octopus smart tariff (perhaps wrong name) and the tracking around that. I’ve been mega fustrated since I moved house with Bulb, because I was stuck on an economy 7 tariff and -apparently- they didn’t have the capability to move me off of it.
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I have a red button (under the desk obvs) that I press that turns everything on/off in my office. It does it by time too if I forget.
I also have various HomeKit scenes to make sure there’a not things on where they shouldn’t be.
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I’m not sure what the octopus mini is capable of but I use a third party app called Octopus Watch. It uses the octopus API to expose electricity and gas usage, which then can be exported to CSV for analysis (the export only currently supports electricity).
I’ve paid the subscription fee for the app so I have a few additional features, but these screens give you an idea of what it shows.
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Amazing, cheers! I found one called Hugo which seemingly accesses your smart meter data directly but I can’t find a way to export. Will check this one out.
Would really love a live data feed for this trending. Google Sheets Export has spoiled me.
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Octopus Watch (which I used extensively when I was on Octopus Agile and Go tariffs) is great.
But it can’t (yet) cope with the Intelligent Octopus tariff. Now here’s where it gets rather insane.
Intelligent gives fixed off-peak rates between 23:30 - 05:30 BUT it can also give additional 30-minute ‘slots’ at any time outside the fixed off-peak period, These additional slots are triggered by how much your EV needs charging AND when active, the ENTIRE electricity import to the house is charged at off-peak. So… with a bit of planning and a bit of configuration magic, you can use an EV as an off-peak ‘dongle’. Plug it in and boom - cheap electricity.
Once you get to that stage, you can set-up automations in HA to use stuff only when the additional ‘slots’ are active - in other words, when you’re getting off-peak rates. The car ‘readyForCharging’ state generally triggers the ‘Intelligent Slots’, which are shown in the Intelligent Octopus integration:
When the slots are active (during the time periods shown in yellow below), it’s cheapo leccy:
So automations are based around the slots. If a 3-hour slot is available, hot-tub heating on. If a 2-hour slot is available, washing machine on. If a 1-hour slot is available, dishwasher on. Etc.
Yes, the 35-grand car offsets this what-looks-relatively-minor saving. But it’s actually a huge saving on a day-to-day basis, and you need a car anyway…
EDIT: I’ve been using the Octopus Home Mini for a week now and the live data, shown in the ‘History’ graph above is spot-on. You can see the current demand and graph in the Octopus app and also in HA:
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Couple of updates on my setup:
10kWh libbi battery installed last week!
The home assistant integration for myenergi doesn’t include the libbi yet, but I can get some of the data (import, export, solar generation) from the zappi 2 sensors. So now my home assistant dashboard includes solar which is nice;
And I’ve been able to get the ‘Energy’ dashboard working using data from the CT clamps for my libbi/zappi setup which is nice:
Just had an email to say my octopus home mini is ‘on the way’, which is great. I’ll probably use that instead of the CT clamp data as that should more closely match what I’m billed for.
So I’ve got the cost of my electricity under control now with solar and a battery. Now my focus will be on reducing our reliance on gas for heating and hot water. So I’ll be looking at getting a water cylinder and a heat pump, but probably not until next summer.
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I’ve had the Octopus Home Mini feeding into Home Assistant for about 4 months now - it’s been flawless.
I don’t have solar or battery (yet) but have been very experimental with Intelligent Octopus. And while it was a technical success, it wasn’t an overall commercial success. So I’ve switched back to Agile for electricity and Tracker for gas. It’s working out well for the ‘summer’ so far.
My Energy dashboard looks simple compared to yours (and I’m 5% up on the carbon consumed!):
Happy with the import electricity though, even without PV/Battery:
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This looks really cool. Would love to know a bit more how you got this setup in HA?
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Depends a little on where you want me to start haha. Assuming you know nothing about HA, to achieve what’s shown in that gif you need to:
- Buy something like a raspberry pi
- Install home assistant on to it
- Go through the set up process and eventually get to the stage where you can add integrations for things like Philips hue, nest, WiZ, roomba, etc.
- Add the integrations for your smart lights and sockets.
- Create dashboards with toggles for turning those devices on and off.
- Add “picture elements” to those dashboards that (with a bit of basic code) will show different png files depending on the state of certain devices.
- Draw a house schematic (or use an online house planner tool) and save off a bunch of different versions to represent each possible state that each device could have.
- Upload the images to something like Imgur, then add the URLs for those pngs into the picture element code.
That’s pretty much it. If you’re already familiar with HA. The element I’ve used to create a dynamic image is called the picture elements card. Here is a thread with a bunch of guides on how to use this card: Styling elements in Picture elements card: a small tutorial - Dashboards & Frontend - Home Assistant Community
This album includes the assets I made for my house schematic and how I sectioned off the different elements and utilised the transparency of pngs to layer them on top of each other in the code for the picture element: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
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Definitely familiar with HA, I’ve sunk a lot of time into it! I have just requested a Octopus Home Mini too, as the integrations I’ve been using for getting the energy data have always been unreliable. Appreciate the links! Your dashboards look great. Thank you 
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I hate the way this place keeps costing me money!
Raspberry Pi ordered.
Looking forward to getting everything set up. It’s quite impressive seeing just how many services and devices HA integrates with.
Further down the road, would love to get a touchscreen control panel up where I can see energy usage, agile rates, control heating + lighting and see the charge level on my car.
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An old Nexus 7 tablet mounted in the kitchen running the HA app does exactly that.
Which reminds me, I have to update that dashboard a little.
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Funnily enough I gifted these to my sisters an age ago. I don’t think they use them anymore.
Not sure there’s a better place to ask this, but what hardware are people running Home Assistant on?
I went down the Raspberry Pi 3B route, and so far I’m having a terrible time. I’ve sunk more money than I spent on the Pi on various bits and pieces to get it to work, but now im finding that the Pi is constantly running out of memory and hanging. I can’t even get past the Home Assistant login screen before it hangs - I haven’t even added any devices yet!
Surely Home Assistant OS will at least run on a Pi 3?
I’m thinking maybe I should just cut my losses, start again with new hardware and save this Pi for another project.
Also, if I were to for example run Home Assistant from macOS, just to see how all the automations work with the devices I’ve got, and to see whether it’s worth going all in with Home Assistant, can I then port that setup to a dedicated device, like a Pi 4 running Hassos?
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I’d only recommend Pi 4+ for HA:
I also had a number of fundamental issues running HA with a Pi 3, which has now been repurposed as a reliable Plex server. Never had an issue with HA on the Pi 4
And start from scratch when changing hardware platforms - there can be all sorts of random variables introduced when trying to port data from one hardware platform to another. Good luck 
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yep, same as @davidwalton. I started off with a raspberry pi 3 and got it working but it was really sluggish and would often crash. So I recently upgraded to a raspberry pi 4 and had no such issues.
Some basic tips for anyone else who may stumble upon this topic:
Once you have installed home assistant on the microSD card for the pi, plug it into your router and you should be able to discover it on your network using a browser on any device on your network. What I tend to do is plug a keyboard and monitor into the pi on first start up to monitor it and make sure it successfully boots. The first boot can take ages so give it plenty of time.
Once you’ve connected to it via a browser on your PC or laptop or wherever, go through these steps: Onboarding Home Assistant - Home Assistant
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