Solarprod

Help

solarprod works out how much power your roof will make, what your battery should do with it, and which electricity plan leaves you best off. This page gets you going. Every setting has its own short guide, linked where it comes up.

Set up your place once, in nine short steps

Everything about your house lives in a layout. Press + Create new layout and we walk you through it, one screen at a time. Skip anything you do not know yet; the defaults are sensible and you can come back.

  • Address. Type it and pick it from the list. That sets the weather, the sun angles and the postcode your plans are filed for.
  • System type. Grid-connected home, off-grid home, or caravan / RV. The steps that do not apply to yours are skipped.
  • Solar panels. One group for each direction your panels face, with the panel size and how many. Or let us read your roof from the satellite picture.
  • Inverter. Connect it and the forecast checks itself against what your roof actually made. Optional.
  • Battery. How big it is and how fast it can charge.
  • Energy sources. Off-grid only: your generator, or site power for a caravan.
  • EV charging. When you leave and how much charge you want in the car.
  • Daily energy usage. Roughly how much power the house gets through in a day.
  • Retail plan. The plan you are on now, or the one you are thinking about.

Once it is saved, the Layout panel at the top of the calculator shows every row with a pencil beside it. Click the pencil to change that one thing. A free account gets a few layouts; the badge beside + Create new layout says how many you have left.

  • Switching between layouts and editing one row at a time: Choosing and editing your layout
  • Which system type is yours and what each one turns off: System type
  • What Azimuth, Tilt, Power and Count mean, and where to find them for your install: Panel groups
  • The battery size to enter, and why the usable number is the one that counts: Battery capacity
  • Working out your daily usage from a bill: Daily load
  • Finding your plan in the picker and reading its rates: Retail plan

Pick the days, press Calculate, and read your plan for the week

Under the layout panel, four tabs choose how far ahead to look. Optimise for says what the battery should be working towards, and Calculate does the rest.

  • Single day for one date, Week ahead for the next seven days on the real forecast, Date range for any stretch of past weather, and Calendar year for a whole year (or the average of the last five).
  • Optimise for Best price (easy) gives you a plan you can follow with a couple of timers a day. The other choices work the battery harder, keep it full for an outage, or chase the lowest CO2 instead of the lowest bill.
  • The Forecast section answers the money question first: what you will earn or pay, and what you would have paid without solar. The tiles under it break that into solar made, self-sufficiency, power exported and imported, battery charge and cycles. Every tile has an (i) that explains its number.
  • The chart shows your solar as a range, not a line, because the further out the forecast the less anyone knows. The band widens to say so.
  • The Action plan is the day-by-day list: when to export and down to what charge, when to top up from the grid. Set your inverter’s timers to match and the saving is yours.
  • What every number in the Forecast section means and how it is worked out: Your forecast, number by number
  • The Optimise for choices side by side and when each one wins: Battery strategies
  • Export to the grid or charge the car, and what changes when you switch: Goal
  • Reading the energy-flow chart, line by line: Energy flow
  • Why the solar line is a band, and how to read it: Forecast uncertainty
  • How the car and the house are planned together, including sending power back from the car: EV charging

Find the plan that is cheapest for your house, not for an average one

Once you have solar and a battery, what you buy from the grid is whatever is left after your roof and battery have done their bit. That changes which plan wins, so we run your system on every plan rather than guessing.

  • The Retail plan row shows the plan you are on. Its pencil opens the picker, where every plan shows its real rates: supply charge, buy and feed-in prices by time of day, and weekend rates where the retailer prices weekends differently.
  • Press Email me the best plan and we run a full year of your house on every residential plan published for your postcode. The top picks come by email and the whole ranking as a spreadsheet, so you can check our maths.
  • Every plan gets three numbers: what it costs if you work the battery, what it costs if you just let it self-consume, and the difference.
  • Rates shown already include a retailer’s guaranteed discount, so they can read lower than the advertised ones. Plans with strings attached say so: Seniors Card required, new customers only.
  • We cannot see your bill, and once in a while a retailer refuses a plan it filed for your address. When someone tells us, that plan wears a Hard to get badge and the ranking names your next best.
  • Every plan filed with Energy Made Easy carries a check the source link to the regulator’s own page, so you can see the numbers we read.

Connect your inverter and the forecast learns your house

The Inverter row of your layout is where you connect it. Once it is connected we check the forecast against what your roof actually made, learn the trees and buildings that shade your panels, and pick up your real usage. The further out the forecast, the wider the band we draw, so the answer stays honest about what it knows.

Control: see what your inverter is doing and set its timers

Control in the top bar opens one card per connected inverter. The top of the card is live: solar, battery, grid and home load right now. Below it are the things you can set, which depend on the brand.

  • Resting state is what the inverter goes back to when nothing is scheduled: one of three export options and a minimum battery level. Changing it does not change the inverter now.
  • Grid export is the same three options, but live: export down to the floor, never export the battery, or no exports at all.
  • Battery timers are windows on the days you pick: charge from the grid to a level, sell down to a level, or stop exporting. They are listed in the order they will run.
  • The negative-price shield stops exports when your Amber price goes below zero, and Deye owners can edit the inverter’s own time of use table.

Automation: the forecast in your inbox, the plan on your inverter

Automation in the top bar is solarprod working while you sleep. Each saved layout has two separate switches, so you can have either, both or neither.

  • Daily email: we run the forecast for the layout and send it at the hour you pick, with how each day’s prediction has moved, the week ahead, and the action plan.
  • Daily timer updates: the plan is set up as timers on your inverter now and rebuilt every morning from the latest forecast, until you switch it off. Your own timers are never touched.
  • Unsubscribing from the email does not stop the timers, and stopping the timers does not stop the email. The email footer has a one-click link for each.
  • The daily email is part of the paid plans, because running a forecast for you every night costs compute.
  • What is in the email, when the timers are rebuilt, and how to turn each off: The Automation page

See if you could live without the grid

Take your place off-grid on paper. We play a whole year out day by day and show you the days the battery would have run dry, what a generator would have burned, and whether more panels or a bigger battery fixes it.

Every setting, explained in a page

The defaults are sensible. Change one when you know your own number, and read its page first if you are not sure what it moves.

Outside Australia?

The calculator works anywhere the weather does. The plan ranking is Australian for now. Local notes for the UK, the USA and Canada.

Still stuck? Email us

Write to [email protected] and a person answers. The Where to read more post collects outside guides worth reading, and About says who we are.

Closes this tab and returns to the calculator.