Smart EV Charger Integration
Integrated a smart EV charger into a home energy management system running on Home Assistant
Overview
This project ran across three semesters at Odisee Ghent as part of the Energy Technology programme. The brief was to integrate a smart EV charger into a home energy management system (HEMS) using Home Assistant as the central platform. It was a 12 ECTS project, which meant it carried real weight, and we scored 16 out of 20.
The project covered everything from physical installation of the charging hardware through to the software stack that makes the charger communicate intelligently with the rest of the home’s energy system. The goal was not just a working charger but a charger that responds to grid conditions, solar generation, and household load in a way that makes economic and technical sense.
The Challenge
A standalone EV charger is straightforward. A smart EV charger that integrates with a home energy management system is considerably more interesting. The charger needs to receive commands from the HEMS, report its status back, and respond dynamically to changes in available capacity. If solar generation drops or the household load peaks, the charger should throttle back without losing session state. If there is surplus solar, it should ramp up.
Getting this to work requires understanding the communication stack at every layer: the physical interface between the HEMS and the charger, the protocol used to carry commands and telemetry, and the Home Assistant automation logic that makes decisions.
What I Did
I owned most of the technical side of this project. My teammate handled the documentation and project management, which let me focus on the hardware and integration work.
Charger Installation
Physical installation of the EV charging hardware: mounting, cabling, circuit protection, and commissioning. Working with real hardware and real power levels requires care. A charger rated for 7.4 kW on a 32A circuit is not something you commission carelessly.
Communication Integration
Connecting the charger to Home Assistant required understanding the communication protocol the charger uses to report status and receive commands. This involved configuring the integration on the Home Assistant side, mapping the charger’s data points to entities that the HEMS can act on, and verifying that commands round-tripped correctly.
Energy Management Logic
The interesting part was writing the automation logic in Home Assistant that makes the system actually smart. The rules govern when the charger runs at full power, when it throttles, and when it stops entirely based on grid import, solar production, battery state, and time-of-use tariffs. Getting the logic right, particularly around the edges (what happens when the solar reading drops out, what happens if the charger loses connectivity mid-session) took considerably more iteration than the happy path.
Testing and Validation
Logging the charger’s behaviour across real charging sessions and comparing actual energy flows against the expected behaviour of the automation logic. This is where you find the cases that do not behave the way you thought.
Why This Project Matters
EV charging integration is a genuinely difficult problem at scale. The gap between a charger that works and a charger that works intelligently inside a home energy system touches power electronics, communication protocols, control logic, and user experience. This project gave me hands-on experience with all of those layers.
For anyone hiring in EV charging, energy storage, or smart home energy management: this is the most directly relevant project on my CV.
TODO: add image at public/projects/ev-charger/system-diagram.png (system architecture diagram showing charger, HEMS, solar, and grid connections)
TODO: add image at public/projects/ev-charger/dashboard.png (Home Assistant dashboard showing charger status and energy flows)
TODO: add image at public/projects/ev-charger/install.jpg (photo of installed charger hardware)