This spring my wife and I went ahead and bought a (used) EV, Skoda Enyaq iV80 2022. It’s not relevant for this blog but it’s a very nice car, and I do enjoy the EV “way”.
With that said I found myself trying to optimize the charging and our electricity provider didn’t really integrate more than price optimization. I wished to include solar energy into the optimization engine.
The problem
I’m currently on Skellefteå Kraft which doesn’t really integrate more than spot-optimization on the charger. Tibber, the “modern” alternative, doesn’t yet integrate with SigenStor from Sigenergy, though I’m told it’s in beta right now. When that arrives I might simply move to Tibber and drop EVCC, KISS is the king after all.
A third solution is to go all-in Sigenergy and buy their EV Charger, super easy but costly and why should I replace a functional EV Charger to begin?
The solution: EVCC
What I found is that EVCC solves all my problems, and is very user friendly. It takes the electricity price, solar production, and my custom plans into account and decides when to charge:
The setup
EVCC runs standalone, through Docker, on my Raspberry Pi. For the integrations:
- Nordpool — electricity prices (SE4) with custom formula (add your own costs).
- SigenStor — solar and battery status, so the car charges on surplus solar when the sun is out.
- Easee — the EV charger, via cloud integration.
- Skoda — the EV, via cloud integration.
One thing worth noting: I don’t have an evcc.yaml at all — EVCC only uses its .db. Most guides assume the yaml config, so it took me a moment to realize the setup simply lives in the database and using the UI.
I control EVCC mainly from the EVCC web portal, but sometimes I do it from Home Assistant using the HACS evcc integration.
And it works cleanly:
Additional info
I believe there are some very important parts I left out, namely:
Plans
You can add one or more plans, recurring or not, where you say “I need X % by Y”. These are then automatically optimized together with all available sensors and metrics.
Arrival is a sub-setting where you can also tell EVCC to always charge the car to X % directly as it arrives.
Battery
Battery Boost: lets EVCC draw on the home battery to charge the car beyond pure solar surplus (handy right before a departure). It’s enabled per charging session, with a configurable limit for how far the battery may be drained. I keep this blocked to allow SigEnergy to optimize it’s AI better.
Battery Prioritization: you can choose which gets priority — battery over car, or the reverse.
Spot Price
There are additional tweaks to add, such as “don’t charge when export price is above X SEK, then rather export energy to earn money”. And the reversed option, import energy when it’s cheap enough to charge the car.
Mode
EVCC has 4 modes, “Off”/“Solar”/“Min+Solar”/“Fast”, which control how aggressively the car is charged. I use “Solar” which means that unless a Plan is active it’ll only charge using Solar excess power, when price is under my defined SEK limit.
Final words
EVCC is great, I highly recommend it to anyone on the fence.
~Hampus Londögård