Building my own power manager to solve a real problem

Don't start vibecoding thinking you're building a new money-making SaaS. If you want to learn vibecoding, just fix your own problems. 😊

I struggled with tracking what was using electricity in my house and aligning my consumption with my solar panel production. So I built my own Power Manager from scratch using Claude, centralizing all the information I could gather from my devices. Most of it involved connecting to available APIs:

→ Electric meter (through the P1 socket)
→ Car (MySkoda API)
→ Water heater (Atlantic API)
→ Smart sockets for energy-hungry devices: pool filter pump, pool heat pump (Tuya API)
→ Weather forecast to anticipate solar panel production (Opendata API)

As I was missing some crucial info, I had no choice but to go deeper. RS485 cable, serial protocol, MQTT, SQLite... For someone who doesn't code, that rabbit hole was real. But I got there. 😅

The result: a complete real-time dashboard showing exactly what's happening at home. 🤩

Then I went further. I built automation logic that:

→ Adapts the charging intensity of my car based on solar panel production
→ Activates the water heater when production exceeds consumption (so I don't pull from the grid later)
→ Helps me anticipate my next electricity bills based on previous years' patterns and the current situation

Keep in mind that I'm not a developer. I have no intention to scale or distribute this, and I know that would be a whole different challenge. But I learnt A LOT by building it, and I now use it every single day. 😊

❤️Little bonus: all of this is also visible on my Elgato Stream Deck. One button, and I can see it all 😄

What problem would YOU solve first if you started vibecoding?