Idea

Philipp Trenz suggested Jun 18, '23

Cooperation with Tibber regarding a dynamic electricity tariff

The electricity provider Tibber offers a dynamic electricity tariff in which the average spot price on the electricity exchange is charged either on an hourly or monthly basis. For monthly billing, you enter the meter reading into the app at the end of the month; for hourly billing, you currently either need a smart meter gateway (which unfortunately are still not being rolled out in Germany), an intermediate meter from Discovery or the so-called Tibber Pulse (cf. here).

@Christian Butterweck has already developed a script to charge ESS based on the spot price, thanks for that! With hourly billing based on spot market prices and a smartly responding ESS, electricity costs can potentially be saved and the power grid stabilized.

I would love to see a cooperation between Victron Energy and Tibber so that the GX device is able to report hourly consumption values to Tibber and thus no additional meter is necessary. After a first inquiry from me, the Tibber team seems to be quite open to this and they already offer some open interfaces in their system. So it looks like there is a similar philosophy for dealing with interfaces.

ESS

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mvader (Victron Energy) commented Jun 18, '23

Hi, had you seen this one?

https://github.com/victronenergy/dynamic-ess

Wrt. Tibber and making it possible to use a Victron meter also for their metering: sounds nice, but I do need to think about that a bit / and/or don’t have time to manage that in the coming months.

Anyone is welcome to do it ofcourse, but especially if we (Victron) somehow get responsibility towards Tibber wrt costs and finances; since being an intermediary in the data transfer; it would require a few “extra second thoughts”.

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Christian Butterweck commented Jun 19, '23

@phtr Thanks for the flowers. For the sake of completeness, I'll link the script here again: https://github.com/christian1980nrw/Victron-ESS__Shelly-Plug-S__AVM-Fritz-DECT200-210__Spotmarket-Switcher

@mvader (Victron Energy)

There are more topics than providing Tibber some data. What about the other way around? I would like to see the Tibber Pulse infrared reader without cloud on the LAN as a meter for the Victron ESS. This means that no further meter would have to be installed by a electrician to use a Victron System (similar like ElWiz or LocalPulse2Tibber is doing already https://github.com/iotux/ElWiz / https://github.com/MSkjel/LocalPulse2Tibber ). Next step would be a single phase 600W or 800W (same as balcony power plants) do it yourself PlugIn ESS System with significantly reduced installation costs.

Regards

Christian

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mvader (Victron Energy) ♦♦ commented · Jun 21, 2023 at 09:39 PM

Hi Christian, it will be many meters, there is more than just tibber.

But besides all sorts of practical concerns, in general I’m 1000% enthusiastic about finding a way to make ESS work with a preinstalled meter!

And compliments on your spotmarket switcher btw!

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rodwalker commented Jun 22, '23

I would also like to use the Tibber pulse instead of the victron energy meter. It is very similar to https://github.com/RalfZim/venus.dbus-fronius-smartmeter, which I can run on Venus OS Raspi, by disabling the Fronius parts and putting dummy values.

Independently, I can use https://pypi.org/project/tibber.py/ to read the Pulse readings. I am stuck putting this onto the Raspi since pip install fails and, maybe related, the package anyway requires python 3.9.

Any tips here would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Rod.

P.s. pip3 install tibber.py

ends

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'dataclasses'
even after installing this package separately.

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Christian Butterweck commented · Jun 22, 2023 at 03:24 PM

I think the cloud data of the Tibber api is too slow, so forget this tibber.py project. You need real time data. But within the LAN like the linked github projects it should work if someone invests some time to adapt it.

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rodwalker Christian Butterweck commented · Sep 17, 2023 at 01:02 PM

I think it is fast enough. Using the GraphQL subscription to liveMeasurement I get updates every 2 seconds, which is the same as the Tibber API and the Victron ET340. Of course it relies on the network and Cloud API stability, but none of this is critical.

Since the recommended python library needs version 3.9, I used the WebsocketsTransport directly. This works but I am missing all the best practice stuff, e.g. retries.

Pulse gives a single value for power and powerProduction. The difference is the net power which I just share across the phases

self._dbusservice['/Ac/L1/Power'] = netPower/3
self._dbusservice['/Ac/L2/Power'] = netPower/3
self._dbusservice['/Ac/L3/Power'] = netPower/3

Then I see the same values for "AC input" and "AC loads" which confuses me a bit, but at least the values are there and update.

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crash-override commented Oct 12, '23

Hey guys,

I have a node red flow to locally read your tibber pulse.

You need to set it in config mode pull gateway 3 times, then connect to its wifi hotspot and point your browser to the node.

Enable force_webserver_enabled and save it. Then pull it again to start it in normal mode.

Then change IP to your pulse in my flow and you can use its data.

https://git.bit-cloud.de/Crash_Override/VictronGX_Custom_Sensors/src/branch/main/node-red-flows/tibber_local_node.json

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stromesel commented · Oct 31, 2023 at 10:04 AM

A simple solution for that on the base of Home-Assistant would be nice.

Is your solution working great?

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Joe commented Dec 23, '23

Hi guys,
I am using the EM24 Ethernet within my Victron ESS environmnet and would love to use the EM24 instead the Tibber Pulse as my IR interface with my MT681 is already occupied with SMA Home Manager Gen1. (feed the Tibber app with EM24 data)

In addition I have an ESP32 SML reader, sniffing the IR data from the MT681 which could also be used if integrated instead of the Tibber pulse.

Format from the ESP32: (all 3 seconds)

11:42:42 RSL: tele/tasmota_CC4D70/SENSOR = {"Time":"2023-12-23T11:42:42","Switch1":"on","Haus  ":{
  "Power_curr":3324.00,"Total_in":30458.4543,"Total_out":70429.1940,"Meter_number":"0649534b0abcdefghijklmn"}}

Is anyone aware of a working Smartmeter alternative to Tibber pulse with the EM24?