Optimisations and Tools for Home Assistant and hydro-qc add-on for Hydro Quebec's Winter Credit Option.
This repository contains my Home Assistant optimisations in order to minimise energy consumption and maximise winter credits offered by Hydro Quebec to customers that join the Rate D - Winter Credit plan, also known as CPC option. You can learn more about how the Winter Credit Option works here
Historically, I started optimising energy well before HQ introduced the WCO program and even before I had Home Assistant. My goal was to optimise a 35 year old Lennox heat pump that had an energy inefficient timer-based defrost board. Since each forced defrost cycle after 30 minutes of heat pump run time, wastes significant energy (basically heating the outdoors and cooling the indoors -- in winter), I built a new defrost board based on ESP32. This board only defrosted the outdoor coils when necessary and I was able to save about $300 of electrical energy annually.
Since this project forced me to monitor energy consumption on the heat pump, the electric furnace and other room heating, I extended the project to modify heating patterns when the Winter Credit Option was first introduced as a pilot project. I finally migrated all my custom ESP32 based heating controls over to ESPHome and Home Assistant. I added into HA the hydroqc add-on for Home Assistant hydroqc which made automations even easier. Many thanks to mdallaire, the author of the add-on.
Since 2020, every year, the optimisations have improved, energy consumption has decreased and WCO credit $ have increased. I am sharing these optimisations to anyone having Home Assistant with sensors and controls for energy consumption and home heating.
This year, an addtional tool was built: The WCO simulator and validator spreadsheet. Click on the link, then use the download button in Github to download the spreadsheet to your computer. This tool can fetch a user's winter credit details and full hourly consumption history to validate that your credits are calcuated propertly by Hydro Quebec. Furthermore, the tool allows a user to run "what-if" scenarios in order to determine the best parameters for energy savings all the while maximising credit $ available from Hydro Quebec under the program.
If you are only interested in using the Simulator/Validator tool, you'll find instructions for the Simulator here, and for the Validator here. I appreciate any feedback and if issues are found, please open on issue in Github.
Please see the Wiki for detailed instruction and explanations of the HA optimisations and WCO simulator and validator spreadsheet
The author does not work, directly or indirectly with Hydro Quebec. The tools here in are in no way associated with Hydro Quebec.
Under no circumstances does the author condone or encourage the abuse of the Hydro Quebec Winter Credit Option by wasteful energy usage for the sole purpose of deriving credit dollars.
This code is released into the public domain for non-commercial use.
Permission is granted to copy, modify, and redistribute this code, provided that proper credit is given to the original author in any derivative works or redistributed versions. This code is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, express or implied. The author shall not be held liable for any damages, losses, or other issues arising from the use, misuse, or inability to use this code.
Commercial use requires prior written permission from the author.