SmartHomeShop Docs

Home Battery Planning and Control

The battery planner compares dynamic prices, mapped energy sources, state of charge and forecasts to recommend charge, hold or discharge. Advice is the default; automatic control is an additional opt-in step. Set it up under Energy > Settings > Battery. The plan is recalculated every 5 minutes.

Required Inputs

  • battery state-of-charge sensor;
  • usable capacity in kWh;
  • maximum charge and discharge power;
  • target and reserve state of charge;
  • charge and discharge efficiency;
  • a connected dynamic energy contract; fixed and variable contracts have no price curve to plan against;
  • preferably a PV forecast and suitable household load information.

Optional settings cover cycle cost, assumed load, import/export limits, minimum confidence and planning horizon. The form starts with 15% reserve, 90% target, 3000 W charge and discharge power, 0.95 efficiency, EUR 0.03 per kWh wear, 0.55 minimum confidence and a 36-hour horizon, adjustable from 6 to 48 hours.

Advice Mode

Start with automatic control disabled. Inspect the current recommendation, confidence, planned hours and underlying source entities for several days. This reveals sign conventions, missing forecasts and unrealistic power limits without commanding the inverter.

Automatic Control

Automatic control requires an administrator to map a supported control entity:

  • a switch for enabled/disabled grid charging, which cannot force discharging;
  • a signed number where positive and negative values represent power direction;
  • a select entity with explicit charge, self-use/idle and discharge options.

With Automatically apply recommendations on, the integration creates a managed automation that applies the recommendation every 5 minutes and after a Home Assistant restart. Keep only one system in control; competing vendor schedules and Home Assistant automations can repeatedly overwrite each other.

Safety Boundaries

  • Reserve state of charge must remain below the target.
  • Configure realistic inverter and grid limits.
  • Keep the battery management system and inverter protections enabled.
  • Confirm the action for every control mode before enabling automatic execution.
  • Disable control when source entities become unavailable or recommendations remain low-confidence.
  • Battery wear, taxes, forecast errors and vendor behaviour can make actual savings differ.

Battery control is an optimisation aid, not a guarantee of availability, profit or grid-code compliance.