Battery strategies

Full optimization

The default. We find the cheapest plan for the day: cut what you buy from the grid first, then sell into the evening peak whenever the battery can spare it and still cover tomorrow. It squeezes the most value out of your plan and your solar forecast.

The trade-off: because it reacts to each day’s weather and prices, the exact charge/discharge/export actions change every day. There is no single fixed timer schedule that reproduces it — you’d follow the recommended windows day by day (our daily battery-plan emails do this for you).

Easy implementation

A deliberately simple schedule you can set once on a timer and leave. We work out the same plan, but under two extra rules: at most one grid-charge window per day (the battery charges from the grid in a single contiguous block) and at most one export window per day (the only time anything flows to the grid — battery discharge plus surplus solar feed-in). Outside those two windows the system self-consumes normally (solar charges the battery, the battery serves load) and surplus solar the battery can’t absorb is curtailed rather than exported.

We still choose when each window falls and how much to charge or export to minimise your bill — it just can’t trade with the grid continuously through the day. You give up some savings versus Full optimization in exchange for a plan that’s trivial to put into practice on a basic inverter: two timer settings, no minute-by-minute load-following.

Maximize Battery Charge

Built for blackouts. We never let the battery fall below50% of capacity, so there is always something in the tank if the grid drops out. Solar surplus is exported only during peak-priced windows and otherwise curtailed, rather than being traded aggressively.

Choose this if peace of mind during blackouts matters more to you than squeezing out the last few dollars of export revenue.

Minimize CO₂ emissions

Optimises for carbon, not cost. Electricity from your own panels is zero-emission, so the plan self-consumes first — but the grid’s carbon intensity also changes hour by hour (lowest around midday when solar floods the market, highest in the evening when coal and gas carry the load). When you do have to import, this strategy schedules that import into the cleanest hours of your region’s grid, using per-hour emissions data derived from AEMO’s generation and emission-factor publications. Exports work the same way in reverse: every kWh of your solar sent to the grid displaces generation somewhere else, so surplus sunshine is always exported rather than wasted — but the battery never imports grid power just to re-export it, so your system stays a solar displacer, not an energy trader.

The headline becomes your CO₂ number: how many kg you emitted, and how many kg you saved versus running the same household with no solar and no battery (exported solar counts too — it displaces fossil generation on the grid). Your bill is still calculated on your real tariff and shown alongside, just in smaller type. Expect the bill to be somewhat higher than Full optimization — that’s the price of the cleaner schedule, and it’s usually small.

Outside the National Electricity Market (WA, NT, or overseas) the calculation falls back to the average Australian grid intensity, so the numbers stay indicative rather than region-exact.

Easy CO₂ implementation

The timer-friendly version: the same one-grid-charge-window and one-export-window daily schedule as Easy implementation, but the import window is placed at the grid’s cleanest hours rather than the cheapest. Two timer settings on a basic inverter, minimum carbon for that simplicity.