We’ve always wanted to allow you to control hundreds of kinds of devices in addition to electric vehicles. We’re currently in the process of launching Stekker as a service with IF THIS THEN THAT. Probably around Friday, we’ll start announcing that support for IFTTT is live. You can already use it before that if you’re signed up with IFTTT and you then click on this invite link.
If you have cool use cases to share, please reply! To get you started:
For some things we may not have developed the support. But don’t let that hold you back. Also, if we haven’t implemented something A LOT is possible (especially considering that IFTTT also supports “filter code” which is basically Javascript)!
A few examples:
Turn my Hue lamp red if there’s a shortage on the imbalance market, but turn Green if there’s a surplus! If the grid is balanced, use the color of the EPEX prices (using filter code it can all be done in a single action, using the Realtime API we can trigger it to run immediately when imbalance is detected!)
Start vacuuming my home at night with the Neato BotVac, pause it and dock it to charge when power is cheap.
Boost hot water production with my NIBE heat pump when power is cheapest.
Hey Google, tell Stekker to smart charge to 80% before 9 am
I currently only have IFTTT setup to send me notification when a low prices occurs, but my next appliance is going to be one with an IFTTT connection for sure!
Hi there, I am not a developper but would like to drop a cool idea that would open up much more devices to work with dynamic pricing:
Your Simple Switch to a Smart Home (https://eu.switch-bot.com/)
Our use cases:
-Our hot water (electric) boiler, only charges on the 2 cheapest hours, every 24 hours. IFTTT Stekker script works amazing and saves ~30% financially, automatically uses CO2 scarce electricity.
That’s great to hear, do you you have any ideas on how we can get the word about on this new feature? I think a lot of people want to use this but don’t know about it.
Hi there, I just recently discovered the IFTTT/Stekker integration and was very excited. Right now I am basically only trying it out, to see what is possible or not. Thought I could share some of the things that I have looked at and also some issue that I have come across, so maybe someone have an idea what can be done with those
First, I just want to start by saying that I believe the Stekker/IFTTT intergration might be one of the easiest to access for us private persons without too much computer knowledge (I do know some coding, but certainly not an expert).
Anyway, what I have done so far is for example:
In my house I have underfloor heating controlled by Tado thermostats. Normally I heat up the floor during the night/morning and the house stays warm for quite some time. Now with IFTTT/Stekker I’m using the trigger “A low electricity price occurs” to continue heating the floor also at 6am and 7am if the electricity price is low enough, which means the house will stay warm even longer during the day.
I have also tried the trigger “Hours with cheapest electricity” and reversed it so that heating is turn off or set to low during the most expensive hours. This is still work in progress though, but I believe it can be very useful.
I also started to look at how to use the Stekker query “Hourly prices”. My idea here would be to query for today’s prices in the morning and based on that turn heating up/down during the the hours with most cheap/expensive electricity, but also make sure not to turn off the heating for more than 2 hours, and maybe turn heating on before a period of expensive hours, or for example turn heating up when there are three hours or more in a row during mid day with low prices (house usually stays warm over the more expensive hours then). Another idea I have is to look at also next day’s prices which are included in the query, for example if prices next day will be more expensive than current day, I’m considering to heat up the house during the current day/evening (it takes some time for the underfloor heating to actually have an effect on the temperatur in the house and the heat usually stays for quite some time), so not having to consume as much electricity on the next day/morning when prices would be higher. Work in progress
As an example of the query (for those that have not tried it), here is an example of what is returned and then via IFTTT is sent in an email to myself (for testing purposes): Here are the prices (inverted): Price Currency MarketName 0.09 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.06 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.09 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.08 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.08 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.08 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.08 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.08 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.09 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.10 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.13 SEK Sweden: Lulea 0.11 SEK Sweden: Lulea
and so on (50 hours)
Now to the issues/questions:
A minor issue is that the prices are in EUR but it says currency=SEK when triggers are executed and also in the response to the query. A minor issue but a bit confusing.
Another minor issue is that the queary does not return any information on which item is related to which hour (time.slot). At least I can find that information. I have now managed to figure that out now by comparing with spot market prices, but this information could be useful to have in the query response.
A more problamatic issue is in the response to the query, where the prices seems to be for the default power market for Sweden, which is SE1/Lulea area, whereas I am located in Stockholm area (SE3). I have not found any way of changing this, so maybe someone has any tips on this? I see no “query fields” that can be used for setting the right market when executing the query. On IFTTT website it just says “no fields for this query”. This is in contrast to the triggers where market is one of the “trigger fields” so for the triggers it is possible to set my market to Sweden/Stockholm but not for the query as far as I can see. Any tips on this would be most appreciated.
All in all, a very nice initiative from Stekker I must say. Will continue to follow it closely, and try it out.
Hi Tomas, thanks for sharing all your use cases and experiences here!
Using your floor’s mass to buffer energy based on market prices is a great use case! Hopefully more people will get inspired with your pioneering use cases. Especially the use of Queries is quite advanced.
Currently the selection of the right market inside your country is limited to be the first one in your country, which is Lulea in the case of Sweden. Right now there’s no Query Field parameter like there is with the triggers you’ve set up.
The query should contain many ingredients to choose from. It seems you’re displaying CurrentPrice, Currency (SEK) and MarketName, however you’re right, the time is missing. I’ve been trying to update this, but the IFTTT platform (the pages for the side of integrators like Stekker) is mostly down or giving 404’s. This is sadly a commonly observed thing, but we should be able to get through this. I’ll write down to test this again on Monday and will reach out to IFTTT.
For me to reach the IFTTT integrators platform is needed for the hour ingredient to be add as well as for adding the QueryField. I’d be happy to add it whenever it’s possible on our side, though!
Hi Tomas, we just improved one of the things you mentioned: the price, which is really in EURO as you correctly pointed out is now listed as being in “EUR” instead of “SEK”. We could perhaps change this to SEK in the future, but for now this was the lowest impact to the existing user base so it was easy for me to implement without having to put it on our development roadmap.
I was wondering, is the Stokholm price very different from Lulea?
I’m asking because I’ve pointed out to IFTTT several times that they need to fix several of their pages for me to be able to edit the service and add the parameter (for the query). So far they haven’t changed it, sadly.
I am trying to use IFTTT for starting my Siemens Dishwasher.
However, it gives this error: Applet failed Action failure message: There was a problem running the action.
It looks like the dishwasher goes offline after a while, so the start action fails?
Anyone with experiences with this Home Connect Dishwasher Applet?
Welcome to the forums! And thanks for sharing your use-case.
Have you tried to use the “Button” or some other trigger in conjunction with the dishwasher action? It seems like it’s not really related to the Stekker side of the IFTTT integration if the action fails, but this is a good way to rule it out.
I don’t have Home Connect devices myself, so I can’t tell why you get this error. Does the app that comes with Home Connect (from Siemens) work as intended? That might tell you something about possible connectivity problems.
The prices are in euro’s at this point in time. This means that 0.25 should be entered if you want 25 cents/kWh as a threshold. You assumed correctly: these are the wholesale prices without markup or taxes (no EB or VAT).
I’m replying in English so more people will be able to learn from my remarks.
There are a few quirks that require explanation:
The applet will run each hour if there are multiple matching hours. E.g. if you ask for the trigger to run for the two cheapest hours, it runs a trigger twice. This is because the hours might not be adjacent and the action can’t know if it should run one or two hours.
The description of the Applet is a plain text thing that isn’t updated once you updated the trigger parameters. So this could explain that the applet also ran at 4:00AM, but I’m not 100% sure if that’s what happened in your case (I can’t see the parameters).
I can’t explain the firing of the rule “price above 0.2 EUR”… That is really odd. Can you add a screenshot of the paremeters (the input fields and dropdowns)? Also, if I can know the e-mail address you signed up with, I can dig into it a bit further. You can DM this or send it in a reply here, masking a few characters (so you won’t get spam from those spiders crawling the web for addresses).
