Local EV Charging and Home Energy Management, No Cloud Required
You've got solar panels on the roof, a battery in the basement, and an EV in the driveway. The pieces are all there—but getting them to actually talk to each other, without routing everything through someone else's cloud servers, is another story. That's the gap evcc fills. It's an extensible EV charge controller and home energy management system, and its core goal is refreshingly simple: keep your energy management local.
What It Does
evcc sits between your hardware and your decisions. It reads what your solar inverters, battery systems, and energy meters are doing, then uses that data to control how and when your EV charges—and increasingly, how other loads like heat pumps and heaters behave. It's an open-source project with a clean, simple user interface, and it deliberately doesn't depend on cloud services to do its job.
The breadth of hardware support is where the project really shows its ambition. On the charger side, the README lists a huge range of manufacturers—from ABB, Alfen, and Easee to KEBA, go-e, openWB, Tesla, and Zaptec—plus EEBus and OCPP support, and even build-your-own options like Phoenix Contact and EVSE DIN. It also talks to smart switches (AVM, Shelly, Tasmota, Home Assistant, and others), heat pumps and electric heaters (Daikin, Nibe, Stiebel Eltron, Vaillant, Viessmann, and more), and a similarly long list of energy meters spanning solar inverters, battery systems, and general metering hardware. If you've got a mix of gear from different vendors, the odds are decent that evcc speaks to it.
Why It's Cool
-
Local-first by design. The stated goal is local energy management without relying on cloud services. For anyone who's been burned by a vendor sunsetting its app or an internet outage killing their automation, that's not a small thing—it's the whole point.
-
One brain for a messy ecosystem. Solar gear, batteries, chargers, and heat pumps rarely come from the same manufacturer. evcc's long device lists exist precisely because real installations are patchworks, and something has to translate between them.
-
It reaches beyond the car. Charging is the headline, but the heat pump and electric heater support means evcc can act as a genuine home energy manager—shifting loads around based on what your solar is producing.
-
Multiple integration paths for chargers. Between direct manufacturer support, EEBus, OCPP, and DIY hardware like EVSE DIN, you're not locked into a single vendor's ecosystem to get started.
-
It's been noticed. The project has been featured in PV Magazine and c't Magazin, which suggests it's more than a weekend experiment—it's solving a real problem for real installations.
How to Try It
The README is light on installation commands, so the practical starting point is the project's documentation and release page rather than a one-liner. Here's the path:
- Head to the repository: github.com/evcc-io/evcc
- Check out the latest release for your platform.
- If you prefer containers, there's an official image—the Docker pull count on the README badge suggests it's a well-trodden route (
evcc/evccon Docker Hub). - Browse the device docs to confirm your specific charger, meter, or heat pump is supported before you commit:
Because configuration depends heavily on which hardware you own, the docs are where the real setup work happens—the README is more of a map of what's possible than a step-by-step guide.
Final Thoughts
evcc is best suited to people with a somewhat serious home energy setup—solar, a battery, an EV, maybe a heat pump—who want those systems coordinated locally instead of through a stack of vendor apps. The device support is the selling point, and it's clearly the product of a community maintaining integrations across a sprawling hardware landscape. If your gear is on the list, it's worth a look; if it isn't, the open-source nature means that could change. Either way, the local-first philosophy is one more projects in this space should adopt.
Follow @githubprojects for more developer tools and open source projects.