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What does kasaverde do?

It makes your house greener! It does this by turning TP-Link kasa smartplugs off when the electricity grid in your area is emitting more than normal, and turning it back on when the power grid is cleaner than normal.

What can I use it for?

kasaverde is very good for things that are always on, but don't need to be - so, a cordless toothbrush charger, a cordless beard trimmer charger, phone charger, lawn mower battery charger. Things that need to run a few hours, but you don't care if they run now or later. kasaverde also works well for appliances like dehumidifiers, particularly ones that start dehumidifying as soon as power is provided.

If a thing in your home uses electricity, is compatible with a TP-Link Kasa smart plug, and will start doing what it does once the power comes back on, kasaverde can help.

You probably shouldn't use kasaverde for your tea kettle, coffee maker, or toaster though, as those aren't really using power unless you want toast, coffee or tea. Plus, it would make you wait until the power was green again before you had your coffee, which seems like a non-starter to me. So, if you turn it on to use it, and it turns off when you're done, it's not a great fit.

How does it know when the power is green?

kasaverde queries the very excellent WattTime API. You can read more about their methods here.

Does it work anywhere in the world?

Today, WattTime covers most of the USA, most of Canada, lots of Europe and Australia. Check their coverage map, as they are adding new locations all the time.

How do I start?

Well, you need a small computer to run it on right now. It's working well on raspberry pi devices, but could work on any Linux machine, a mac, or windows machine even, that is on the same IP network with the device you want to manage, for instance over your home wifi. From there, you need to register a username with WattTime's API, get your lattitude and longitude, and configure the app.

Installation

  1. clone this repo.
  2. set environment values. An example.env file is provided.
  3. set up a crontab to run the app every five minutes. See the included check.sh script as an example that's callable from cron.

Configuration

  • WATTTIMEUSERNAME and WATTTIMEPASSWORD are, perhaps unsurprisingly, for the API username and password you will generate for yourself.
  • PLUGHOST is the IP address of the Kasa smartplug you'd like to control
  • MAXMOER tells kasaverde at what point you'd like to turn devices on. The default value of "50" will be treated like a percentage. When WattTime tells kasaverde that power in your area is cleaner than it is 50% of the time, then kasaverde will turn on your smartplug.
  • LATTITUDE and LONGITUDE are for your current lattitude and longitude. kasaverde will provide these to WattTime so that we are getting the emissions data for your area.

How do I get my lattitude and longitude?

Try going to Google Maps (from your computer), and finding your address. If you right click, a menu should pop up, and the first item in that menu will be your lattitude and longitude pair. If you click it, it will copy to your clipboard. kasaverde expects the first number presented to be set in your LATT environment variable, and the second number in LONG.