Fifth

SCE makes me mad

Southern California Edison is deliberately obtuse and has built a complex rate schedule to abuse its customers. For people with solar generation its even worse! they do some fuckery with the Net Metering rates where they total up your energy balance for the year, and any net generation gets paid out at a low flat rate. So if you run the A/C all summer burning expensive power and charging that sick EV but even still you are putting power into the grid- it dont matter. you pay. surplus for 28 days in a month, but soak it up to keep the house cool on grandmas birthday? you pay!

Enter HomeAssistant.

Homeassistant is a superb open source tool for monitoring and managing things in your home. There are a million features and addons and a community of genius people working on it. I won't regurgitate the many kb of text written about HA. just go to https://www.home-assistant.io/

I use HA to watch my energy balance (among other things) and have a good picture of usage, generation, and high consuming devices in the house. We have adjusted our habits some, and can generally count on running a surplus. A big factor was our EV. we charged a lot at home on the 110v and that really chews the kwH. A fortunate career move meant i could ride my bike to work a lot and we ditched the expensive EV. (this probably would have been different if we had the ability to power the home off the EV battery but hyundai hasnt made that option available yet). On a given day i expect to put 3-4 kWh back into the grid. but like i said above, that doesnt matter; i still pay. so how much?

MIDAS Knows!

The MIDAS api was built but the California Energy Commission to allow the public to get information about rates programmatically, with the RIN code on their bill. https://www.energy.ca.gov/proceedings/market-informed-demand-automation-server-midas

MIDAS is cool and all, but it really shines when integrated with HA. now you can match your consumption to the variable rate of your utility to know your costs instead of just trusting those jackasses at the PUC to treat you fairly. MattDahEpic has built the HA integration for us: https://github.com/MattDahEpic/ha-midas

I still have some configuration to do; linking the prices to the energy dashboard and calculating my annual pittance. but at least i know how much the A/C is costing me.