Smart home devices should work without the internet

Re:Smart home devices should work without the internet by alexcano on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:54PM (#50443705)

ev chargers are the worst case of this imo. a lot of them only do the off-peak schedule through the vendor app, so if the cloud goes away you end up charging at peak. on some time-of-use plans that's ~$500 a year for the same car

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Re:Smart home devices should work without the internet by wtch98 on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:05PM (#50443877)

Mine is based on a vestel evc04, and by default has a cloud option with some company saying "we'll do it, move your energy through us" etc.

You can connect it to any evcc endpoint like a local homeassistant, or simply leave it on all the time.

I'm not happy with guaranteeing high availability on my HA install yet (it's not as simple as my pihole which is just a simple vrrp address over the two hosts) though so I just leave it in "always on" mode, and use the timer on the car to come on at 2310 (offpeak starts at 2300 on my tarrif).

I'd be surprised if a charger is genuinely only available via an cloud service, but from asking my neighbours if it doesn't have "an app" they wouldn't buy it.

I'd rather have an API I could poll/poke for the charger rather than set the charger to connect to me, but alas it doesn't have one.

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Re:Smart home devices should work without the internet by pzlarsson on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:27PM (#50444199)

Control over local api was pretty much my only requirement when buying an ev charger, ended up with one from go-e and it works very well.

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