Machine learning home battery planning, tuned per home

Prices are published in advance and solar forecasts are good and getting better. How much electricity a household uses tomorrow evening is the piece nobody hands you.

Most battery timers and simple planners assume every day looks like an average day. Real homes don’t work like that. Weekends differ from weekdays, a cold snap brings the heating on, and the school run moves the morning peak. A plan built on an average is wrong in a slightly different way every day.

We don’t use one national usage curve, and we don’t ask you to fill in a questionnaire about your appliances. ShiftCharge learns from your own battery and inverter readings: when your home uses power, how much, and how that changes with the day of the week and the weather.

Two houses on the same street, with the same battery and the same tariff, will get different plans, because they use power differently. A home with a heat pump, a home that works from home, and a home that’s empty until six all get forecasts that look like them.

Your forecast is updated every night as new readings come in, so it follows the seasons and changes in routine without you having to tell it anything.

It also watches during the day. If your home is using noticeably more or less than expected this afternoon, the plan adjusts its expectations for the hours ahead, and re-plans if the battery would otherwise run short before the expensive evening hours.

Machine learning isn’t automatically better. For some homes, a careful look at recent typical days is just as good. So for every home we check the learned forecast against that simpler approach, using your own history.

Your plan only switches to the learned forecast once it has clearly predicted your home better. If it ever starts doing worse, the plan goes back to the simpler forecast on its own. While this is being worked out, the app tells you it is still learning your home.

No forecast is perfect, so the plan doesn’t bet everything on a single number. When the next few hours are expensive, it leans towards keeping a little more in the battery in case your home uses more than expected. When power is cheap, it doesn’t need to be so cautious.

That way a busier-than-usual evening costs you a little rather than a lot.

Fewer evenings where the battery runs flat before the peak ends, fewer nights spent charging more than you needed, and more room left for your panels on sunny days. You don’t have to adjust anything as the seasons change, because the forecast moves with them.