Transform Your Solar Investment Into an Automated Energy Trading System

There are a number of options - you can select from a Home Assistant Green, Home Assistant Yellow, Raspberry Pi 5, an Intel NUC, or even an old PC you own (you decide what is easiest for you), a hybrid Sungrow, Sigenergy, AlphaESS or Fronius solar inverter with battery system, and an account with either Amber Electric or LocalVolts (and your API key from them). You will also need a free Solcast API key for solar forecasting. Instructions on how to obtain these keys will be included.

It is crucial that your inverter model is supported by Energy Manager and that it includes a Smart Meter for accurate power monitoring and reporting, if not built into the inverter already. For example, Sungrow inverters require the DTSU666, or similar Smart Meter, or else accurate energy readings are not possible.

Note that Fronius is undergoing beta testing at present so if you own a Fronius and want to be involved, we can offer you free Premium for your time (the length of time will be dependent on your involvement).

Home Assistant is a very popular open-source home automation platform. It's free to download and use, and it's released under the Apache 2 license. It can be installed on various hardware, from the official Home Assistant Green and Yellow devices to a Raspberry Pi 5 or an old PC.

The Home Assistant platform runs on Linux, and you generally don't control it like a regular workstation. After installation, you access and configure it from another computer using a web browser. The device is designed to run continuously, so you leave it on all the time while making any configuration changes remotely. While it's powerful, you do need some basic technical knowledge to get started.

We've aimed to make it as straightforward as possible by providing a 95% pre-configured Home Assistant backup. You'll need to be comfortable restoring a backup to your new Home Assistant OS installation. Basic familiarity with Home Assistant is beneficial but not strictly required for the initial setup using our backup. Detailed instructions will be provided. Note that this will delete any data already on the device, so back it up first.

Yes, since Energy Manager is based around energy trading on the volitile Australian wholesale energy market, you must have either Amber Electric or LocalVolts as your energy provider before you can start using the system. It will not work on fixed pricing or energy providers that don't provide any API to retrieve time critical pricing.

Note that Energy Manager is designed to work with Amber Electric and LocalVolts 5 minute billing periods, not legacy 30 minute periods. Energy Manager should still work with 30 minute billing periods but certain features will not be optimal.

Yes and no. You must not allow Amber Electric's SmartShift service to control your inverter for you to use Energy Manager. When you sign up to Amber Electric you grant them admin access to your inverter. This is required for them to display your statistics, etc, in your app - however, for Energy Manager to work, SmartShift must not have the ability to actually control your inverter and battery. You can leave Amber Electric with access to your inverter so that your app will continue to display information properly, but you must remove the ability for it to send commands to your inverter.

If SmartShift tries to change settings that Energy Manager has just changed (or vice-versa), the systems will battle over the settings. Therefore if you intend to continue to use SmartShift and do not want to deny its ability to control your inverter, then unfortunately Energy Manager is not a suitable system for you to make use of.

The energymanager.com.au API key enables communication between your local Home Assistant device and our platform. For the Free plan, this allows us to provide personalised insights and enable certain dashboard features. For the Premium plan, it's essential for the advanced automated trading algorithms, price spike anticipation, and other smart features that are processed and managed by our servers.

We receive information about how your solar inverter is performing, including, but not limited to, your current power import from the grid, export to the grid, power load, solar generation, buy and sell pricing, etc. We also obtain weather information from the BOM integration. This information is required to allow the system to make power decisions for you, customised for your setup and geographic location. The system will also keep a high level summary of your typical power consumption activity to predict upcoming usage, again, to help with the decisions that the system will make on your behalf.

Absolutely not! You should not grant anyone, except your installer and people you really trust, access to your solar account. Depending on the access that is granted, this may give them direct access to make changes to your system. Energy Manager will send commands back to your Home Assistant device, but the Energy Manager servers do not have access to your solar account and have no access to your network.

No, we have no requirement to install any device in your inverter or to visit your residence.

Once you have signed up, confirmed your email, received your free API key, and successfully set up your Home Assistant device and successfully used our free services, you will be able to upgrade to the Premium plan from your user dashboard on energymanager.com.au. Billing is handled via Stripe on a recurring monthly basis and cancellation is hassle-free and actioned through the website dashboard.

Premium plan savings vary based on your energy usage, battery capacity, and local market conditions. During price spike events, users can save hundreds of dollars per month. Even without spikes, the system optimises daily charging/discharging to potentially reduce your electricity bills significantly. The automated trading features help pay off your battery investment faster.

The free plan can still save you money by automatically curtailing your excess energy if export prices are negative (where you would normally pay to export).

Yes! The free plan includes monitoring features, solar forecasting, negative price curtailing, and manual controls with no time restrictions. You only pay if you want automated energy trading features in the premium plan. This ensures you can test the system thoroughly before committing to any ongoing costs, or simply keep using the free version if you have no requirement for more optimisation of your energy or energy trading.

Currently, we only support fresh Home Assistant OS installations for easier setup and support. If you want to integrate with an existing setup, we can offer custom installation services for an additional fee. This ensures proper configuration and reduces support complexity.

Our recommendation is to keep your energy management separate from any other home automations you run. Some people have one Home Assistant device for energy management, and another device for home automation. We are intending on releasing instructions on how to retrospectively install Energy Manager to an existing Home Assistant.

Your Home Assistant regularly checks both your electricity providers API and the Energy Manager API. If for some reason it cannot connect to one of the required APIs, the system goes into 'self-consumption' mode until it detects a return of the API. Without the electricity provider's API, the system does not know the current wholesale electricity pricing, so it is deemed too risky to provide decisions without all the required information. Putting your inverter and battery system into 'self-consumption' mode protects your system from taking from the grid (assuming your battery has available stored energy) when prices could be high, or in a demand period, etc.

Again, if the system cannot reach the Energy Manager API, the same will occur - it will lock itself into 'self-consumption' mode until the API can be reached again. What this means is if you have an internet outage, the energy management system should disable automatically, and will enable again once your connectivity returns.

Without electricity provider and energy manager API connectivity, energy trading functionality cannot occur.

The Energy Manager API servers are fully redundant for premium subscribers, so should one server fail, another should still be able to perform the decisions for your Home Asisstant device.

We provide comprehensive documentation and setup guides. Premium subscribers receive priority ticket support. Free users can access the support ticket system, but all tickets will be at a lower priority. Since our system is 95% pre-configured, most common issues are resolved through our detailed setup instructions. You can also ask questions and talk to other users of Energy Manager in our Discord server.