AC Diversion Load, Part 6

More progress on the project, including the addition of "assist" and "share" modes.

Assist mode enables the diversion load on one leg of the 240V circuit to assist an overloaded diversion load on the other leg. This condition looks for the diversion load dimmer, on the other side, to be at 100% and that there's still a negative power reading, indicating excess power.

Share mode enables the diversion load on one leg to take advantage of load on the other leg of the 240V circuit to "use up" excess power by using it to offset that load.

Both these modes rely on the split phase power system, with L1 - N - L2. Since the utility watt meters read the total power flowing on L1 and L2, if L1 is +100W and L2 is -99W then the sum is 1W. I have set up this mode on a virtual switch button so it can be turned on and off as desired. For example, on a cold winter day, I might want to turn off sharing mode and instead dissipate all the excess power as heat in the house.

Both these modes took 1 line of code each, or 2 if you count the duplicate line of code on the other side of the system. Each condition calculates a dimmer increment, that might be negative, positive or 0. Note that if the share increment is non-zero, then the assist increments must be zero. Then these 2 increments get added into the main condition that calculates the new dimmer setting. It was that easy to integrate these two powerful features into the automation code. It all hinges on having simple core automation logic that's all event driven and doesn't rely on any external state.

By eliminating duplicate variables that I used to use to track the dimmer setting and instead just using only the dimmer setting itself, the state can no longer get out of sync. Plus this allows for manually nudging the system by manipulating the dimmer setting and then observing how the system reacts.

Hardware:
In-wall dimmer: https://amzn.to/3qughPz
Ceramic heat lamp https://amzn.to/3jpdcP8
HEM Gen5 https://amzn.to/3iEgf4i

More to come, waiting to catch both loads working at the same time and some cloud edge effect testing of assist mode...

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Intro/Outro:
Louisiana Fairytale by Austin Rogers
https://web.archive.org/web/20170402222425/http://drfiddle.com/show_tune.php?id=94