ioBroker.powerqueue

PowerQueue is a vendor-neutral ioBroker adapter that distributes an available electrical power budget among prioritized, flexible consumers.

The adapter will use existing ioBroker states for grid power, battery state of charge, device availability, feedback, and control. It will not implement manufacturer protocols itself.

Status: first public release. Observation mode is the default — PowerQueue only switches a device after you have set it to control and released that device explicitly.

Product promise

PowerQueue must be as easy and self-explanatory as possible. A non-technical user should always understand what the adapter is for, what it is doing now, and why it recommends or performs an action. Simplicity and confidence take precedence over adding more features.

PowerQueue answers three questions:

1. How much electrical power is safely available right now?
2. Which configured consumer should receive it?
3. Why was a consumer started, limited, deferred, or stopped?

The first release will focus on deterministic real-time allocation, safe operation, and clear explanations. Forecast-based optimization, dynamic tariffs, and grid-service protocols are later possibilities, not MVP requirements.

Planned MVP

• One grid power input; the sign convention is confirmed by picking a plain-language sentence containing the current reading, never by entering a convention
• Optional battery: charging power counts as available surplus, minimum SoC blocks allocation
• Binary consumers (one writable switch) only
• Ordered priorities, one global reserve, per-consumer minimum on/off times
• off, observe, and explicitly armed control modes
• Per-consumer availability, feedback, manual override, and safe state
• PowerQueue never reasserts a target against a manual or external change
• Stable machine-readable reason codes plus translated explanations
• Live simulation preview before active control
• Restart-safe runtime state, stored in the adapter's own states

Modulating loads, one-shot job loads, deadlines, weekday windows and daily runtime quotas are deliberately deferred to later versions. Power values are numeric from the start, so adding them will not change any published state.

Published states

• plan.valid, plan.reason, plan.reasonText, plan.updated — what PowerQueue decided and why
• budget.* — the waterfall from the grid reading to the unallocated watts
• consumers.<key>.* — state, reason, proposed and applied power, runtime today, last change and the expiry of a manual override

The consumer states are also the restart-safe runtime state: minimum on/off times and the daily runtime survive a restart because they are read back from these states.

In observe no foreign state is ever written. In control PowerQueue writes only the switch of a consumer that is explicitly armed, and only when its target changes. A command from anyone else hands the device over until midnight.

Non-goals for the first release

• No device-specific drivers or account integrations
• No EVCC replacement
• No full home energy management system claim
• No day-ahead mathematical optimizer
• No direct battery dispatch
• No EEBUS, OCPP, or German Section 14a implementation
• No cloud dependency, no telemetry
• No modulating or job consumers yet
• No fighting back against manual or external switching

Safety

PowerQueue will control only states that the user explicitly maps and enables. Observation mode will be the default. Users remain responsible for device suitability, electrical safety, local regulations, and avoiding conflicting automations.

Development

npm ci
npm run build      # adapter (build/) and admin UI (admin/index.html + admin/assets/)
npm run check      # typecheck backend and admin
npm run lint
npm test

Changelog

0.1.0 (2026-08-13)

• (typhosj) Runtime: inputs, evaluation loop, published plan and armed control writes.
• (typhosj) Devices tab: house battery, reserve, and the full device list with order and switching times.
• (typhosj) "Right now" tab: the live plan of the running instance, in the language of the admin UI.
• (typhosj) Optional availability condition per device, with the value that means "may run".
• (typhosj) Survive a stored configuration whose empty device list comes back as an object — the adapter crashed on start instead of reporting what was missing.
• (typhosj) Translations for every supported language.
• (typhosj) The PowerQueue icon from the chosen logo concept, instead of the scaffold placeholder.
• (typhosj) Load the socket library in the configuration page, which never opened without it.
• (typhosj) Ask for the momentary grid power instead of "the meter", and hide energy counters from every power selection.
• (typhosj) Confirming a sentence works again: two configuration fields changed in one click overwrote each other, and on a meter whose readings are negative the confirmed sentence was mapped back to the other one.
• (typhosj) The guided setup opens the next step as soon as one is finished, instead of only after leaving the tab and coming back.
• (typhosj) A device that reports its power can hand its current reading to the configured power with one click.
• (typhosj) The simulation said "drawing" while the house was feeding in, and the budget lines now say that the handed-out power is part of the free power, not on top of it.
• (typhosj) Device cards fold away once a device is complete, and say in one line what they hide.
• (typhosj) The availability condition explains itself instead of being labelled "only when this is set".

0.0.1 (2026-08-07)

• (typhosj) Adapter scaffold: TypeScript runtime, React admin UI, CI and release tooling. Not published; the first public version is 0.1.0.

License

MIT

Copyright (c) 2026 PowerQueue contributors