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openHAB Spot Price Optimizer is an Energy Management System (EMS) that helps you to optimize energy consumption to the cheapest times of the day using openHAB home automation system.
Spot priced electricity contract means that the price of electricity is different for every hour of the day. The day-ahead prices for most European countries are published at around 13.15 CET/CEST on the Entso-E Transparency Platform.
This solution helps to automatically schedule and optimize the consumption of electricity to the cheapest hours. The concept is referred as demand response in electrical grid. If your electricity contract is based on spot prices, you can save significant amount of money using this solution.
The solution can be applied for a variety of devices, including heating of your house, heating the domestic hot water with a water boiler, charging an electric vehicle or heating the water of a swimming pool. The key concept is to calculate control points for the next day, which define when the device is expected to be ON or OFF (or have its other kind of state changed). The picutre below illustrate two use cases: heating the domestic hot water and heating of a house.
The blue area represents the hourly spot prices of electricity. The red bars are the control points for heating the domestic hot water in a boiler during the three cheapest hours of the day. The yellow bars are the control points that control when the heating of a house is ON. On this example day, 14 hours of heating is distributed so that the morning and evening price peaks are avoided.
This solution is provided as an inspiration for other openHAB community members. I disclaim all warranties and responsibilities if you use this solution. In no event shall I be liable for any direct or indirect damages resulting of use this solution. See the license for further terms. If your setup involves high voltage connections, they must always be designed and done by an authorized electrician.
openhab-spot-price-optimizer is developed by Markus Sipilä. Publishing this solution as open source is my small contribution to fight the climate crisis. As the share of wind and solar power increase, the importance of demand response becomes increasingly important. Demand response means shifting demand of electricity to times when there is plenty of electricity available or when the other demand is lower. openhab-spot-price-optimizer helps normal households to do exactly this and save money.
You are more than welcome to join the discussion around this solution on the openHAB community forum.
Support requests to the community forum, please, not to the issues of this github repo. I have spent a beer (or three) writing these instructions so that they would be as complete as possible. I kindly ask you to respect this effort and read this documentation once more before asking for support on the community forum. This request does not mean that you would not be welcome to the community discussions, quite the contrary. It simply means that most problems can be fixed by double checking that your implementation follows the documentation and checking your logs.
In addition to being home automation enthusiast, I'm also semi-professional athlete targeting the 2026 Winter Olympics in mixed doubles curling. If you like the Spot Price Optimizer and want to support our journey towards Milano-Cortina, you can do that by donating a sum of your choice to our curling club's bank account. Fundraising in Finland requires a permit, our permit number is RA/2024/1837 and the fundraising campaign will end on 16 Feb 2025.
- Kisakallio Curling Club ry (VAT ID FI30644384)
- IBAN: FI94 5280 0020 0319 02
- BIC: OKOYFIHH
- Reference number: 20006
- Message (if you can't use the reference number): openhab optimizer