Initially I wanted to see if there was a way to tie the car to my home automation software, HomeSeer, and turns out there’s an awesome plugin called teslaSeer<\/a>. It uses Tesla’s API to create objects within HomeSeer’s interface, so now you can schedule actions or create triggers, like have the car to heat up based on a time or what’s on my calendar for the day. One of the options is to start or stop charging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right after putting in the order for the Model 3, I signed up for ComEd’s Hourly Pricing<\/a> program which takes about a month to really kick in. My thought was just to use the off-peak pricing and schedule my charges from the Tesla directly, say at 2am every night. But… turns out ComEd’s Hourly Pricing program ALSO has an API, just like the car, which is AWESOME and far better than just simple off-peak. The API<\/a> gives you an output of either JSON or XML with 5-minute average or hourly average.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What’s even more interesting is that anyone can see the “Dashboard” off ComEd’s program, and sometimes it dips BELOW 0c, meaning you’re getting credited for consuming electricity as an hourly customer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I thought… if there’s a chance that price could dip below say… a penny per kWh… could I automate a charge then? And stop it if the price is too high?<\/p>\n\n\n\n OF COURSE, it just took some sweat and hacks. My way of doing this isn’t particularly elegant or friendly, but it works for me. Think of IFTTT but with a lot more duct-tape to make it all work. (sidenote, ComEd Hourly Pricing has an IFTTT trigger or whatever it’s called, but it’s not quick enough for what I need”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s what I ended up doing…<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.escarra.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/2018-12-09-22_15_02-Clipboard.png\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.escarra.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/2018-12-09-23_16_56-HomeSeer-Web-Control-Events.png\")