Home automation

A home energy management system watches three things: what your solar is making, what your battery holds, and what your tariff charges at this hour. It then decides when each big load runs.

The hot water heat pump runs when the roof is producing. The car charges after the battery is full, or in the off-peak window overnight. Cooling comes on before the evening peak rather than during it.

You set the rules once. The system does the timing every day after that. Most systems show you, on your phone, what ran, when, and on which source of power.

Home automation is step seven of ten. It comes after hot water, solar, battery, the EV charger, air conditioning and induction because its job is to run those things well. On its own it has nothing to control.

That is why it is not first, even though it is often the piece that makes the earlier steps work as designed. Your plan tells you when you have enough on the roof and in the house for automation to earn its place.

We claim no saving for home automation, by design. A control system does not generate power or use less of it. It changes when things run, and the value of that depends entirely on what you have installed and on your tariff.

What it does instead is make the other steps behave. It moves loads into the hours when your own solar is running or the tariff is at its lowest, and it keeps the battery for the hours that cost the most. Any figure we quoted here would really belong to the solar or the battery, and those two pages carry the figures we can source.

Most automation hardware connects at the switchboard, the inverter or the hot water circuit. Anything wired in must be done by someone holding a Queensland electrical contractor licence, and they provide that licence number before they can take a job through SaveTonnes.

Some systems are plug-in devices or software that lives in your inverter or battery app. Your quote should say which parts are wired in and which are not.

We do not install, and we are not owned by anyone who does.

One enquiry brings up to three quotes from local installers. Each quote should show:

Which loads will be controlled: hot water, EV charger, air conditioning, pool pump, battery.

Whether the system talks to the inverter and battery you have, or plan to have.

What is wired in, and what runs on your Wi-Fi.

Any ongoing subscription for the app or the cloud service, stated plainly.

Who sets the first rules, and how you change them later.

The warranty on the hardware and on the installation.

If a quote is missing any of these, ask for it before you choose.

Start with a few questions about your home and we will set out the ten steps in the right order for you, with automation in its place.

Solar PV, which automation runs loads against. Battery storage + emergency backup, which it decides when to keep and when to use. EV charger, the load it most often shifts. Hot water heat pumps, the first load it will time.