For people who can see it
If you have ever spent too much time looking at solar charts, battery graphs, inverter settings or heat pump schedules, this page is for you. Read on, fellow geeks, hackers and visionaries.
You know the feeling. You look at a graph and see something that technically works, but is obviously wrong.
The inverter charged the battery at night, even though tomorrow will be sunny. The heat pump started a heavy cycle just after solar production dropped and just before cheap hours began. The air conditioner stayed off during the best solar hours, even though the house could have been cooled almost for free.
And you think: this is not impossible to fix. Not easy, maybe. Not trivial. But definitely not impossible.
I have been watching this in my own home for years. It became hard to ignore, not because the hardware is bad. My inverter does its job. The battery does its job. The heat pump does its job. The air conditioners do their job.
The problem is not lack of devices
Modern homes already have serious energy hardware: solar panels, inverters, batteries, heat pumps, air conditioners, hot water tanks and EV chargers. These are not toys. They produce energy, store energy, protect reserve and consume a lot of power.
But most of them live in their own small worlds. The inverter knows solar and the battery. The heat pump knows its schedule. The AC knows room temperature. The charger knows the car is connected. The hot water system knows it has to heat water.
None of them really knows the full context of the home: tomorrow's weather, the next price window, expected solar production, battery reserve, the other devices, or what the owner actually cares about.
So each device behaves locally. You pay for the missing coordination. That is the absurd part.
The battery example
There are days when it makes sense to charge a home battery from the grid at night. Tomorrow may be cloudy. Solar production may be low. Cheap night energy may protect the home from buying expensive energy later.
There are also days when charging at night is the wrong move. If tomorrow will be sunny, I want space in the battery. I want to store my own solar energy. If the battery is full in the morning, the home loses that opportunity.
You can configure time windows and modes. Some inverters give you quite a lot of control. But the real world changes every day: sun, clouds, prices, consumption and the way the house behaves.
How much energy should this specific home have in the battery tomorrow morning?
That is the real question. Not "should the battery charge at night?" The answer depends on the weather, solar forecast, expected consumption, tariffs and comfort needs.
That is the kind of decision GridPassport is built for.
The heat pump example
A heat pump is a great device. Efficient, powerful, serious. But it usually does not know the whole story.
In my own home, I have watched heavy heat pump cycles start at moments that made no sense from the home energy perspective. Solar production was already gone. Cheap hours had not started yet. The battery was doing something else. The electricity price was not great.
And the heat pump said: "Now."
From the heat pump's perspective, maybe that is fine. It has a task. It performs the task. From the home's perspective, it can be ridiculous.
This is not the manufacturer's failure. They build heat pumps. That is already hard. They cannot know every home, inverter, battery, tariff, weather condition and owner preference. This is not their layer.
This is exactly why GridPassport needs to exist.
Real admin panel screenshots
The heat pump is not wrong. It is blind.
These Sundays show one of the first frustrations behind GridPassport. Many heat-pump hot-water systems run a weekly or fortnightly hygiene cycle to heat the tank high enough to reduce Legionella risk. That cycle makes sense. In my house, the timing often did not: after solar was gone, during expensive import hours, shortly before cheaper power starts at 22:00.
The pump is not being stupid. It does not know the tariff, battery state, solar forecast or the plan for the rest of the home. It only knows that Sunday is hot-water hygiene day. That is all.
5 Apr 2026: above 10 kW after sunset
The largest load lands after PV has fallen away and before cheap hours begin. The device did its job. The home paid for the timing.
Yes, these are screenshots from a real first version of the GridPassport admin panel.
Cooling is storage too
Air conditioning makes the same point in a different way. On a hot sunny day, the house may have more solar energy than it can use well. Later, when people come home, the rooms may be uncomfortable and grid energy may be more expensive.
The house should cool itself when energy is cheap, local or abundant. Not too much. Not aggressively. Just enough to use the moment well.
Cooling is also storage. You can store comfort in the air, walls, floors and thermal mass of the building. The AC does not know that unless something above it understands the home.
Your home has more batteries than you think
A home battery is the obvious battery. But the house has other forms of storage already paid for.
- A hot water tank stores energy as heat.
- A building stores comfort as thermal mass.
- An EV charger is a flexible load, even before vehicle-to-grid.
The problem is that none of this is normally treated as one system. The inverter manages the battery. The heat pump manages heat. The AC manages cooling. The EV charger manages charging. But the home has one energy reality: one solar forecast, one tariff, one grid connection, one bill and one owner.
Monitoring is not enough
I like charts. Charts are useful. Monitoring is useful. Seeing energy flows is useful.
But after a while, another dashboard starts to feel incomplete. It shows the problem and leaves you alone with it.
"Look, this was inefficient." Fine. Now what?
Should I check tomorrow's weather, calculate battery reserve, move heat pump cycles, pre-cool the house and watch energy prices every day?
Should I become the energy operator of my own home?
For a few weeks, that can be fun. For some of us, it is addictive. But it is not how normal homes should work. Even people who enjoy this eventually get tired.
The goal is not to give the owner more things to manage. The goal is to make the home manage itself better.
GridPassport is not another smart home gadget
Smart home often means lights, scenes, buttons, sensors and nice dashboards. Some of that is useful. Some of it is fun. But GridPassport is about the heavy side of the home: solar, battery, heating, cooling, hot water and charging.
These devices move real money. They can waste real money. They can also increase comfort, protect reserve, use more local solar and reduce stress on the grid.
But only if they stop acting like strangers.
GridPassport is being built to make them work toward one goal: the owner's goal.
We call this Home Power Automation
Home Energy Management System is the closest existing category. Some HEMS products already do useful things. Some monitor energy. Some manage batteries. Some use tariffs. Some forecast solar. We do not pretend nothing exists.
But what we are building is broader than a dashboard and more independent than one manufacturer's ecosystem.
We call it Home Power Automation: one shared strategy for the serious power devices in the house, using weather, solar production, battery state, electricity prices, comfort, device limits and owner preferences as one decision system.
That is the missing piece.
Where GridPassport fits today
I want to be clear about the current state. GridPassport is not yet a universal system for every house and every device.
Today, the most mature core is around inverters and home batteries. That is where the logic is strongest and where the first real-home results are clearest.
We are working toward air conditioning control next, because cooling is flexible, solar production often overlaps with cooling demand, and the value can be very real. After that, the direction is heat pumps, hot water, EV chargers, more inverter brands, more batteries and more serious devices that can produce, store or shift energy.
We start where useful control is possible without unnecessary installation complexity. Some devices will eventually need deeper or wired solutions. That is fine. The goal is broad coverage, but we are not going to pretend the whole thing is finished.
GridPassport is being built in real homes, with real devices, real data and real energy bills. That is why early users matter.
Why this matters more than it looks
At first, this may look like one house and one annoyed engineer watching graphs. But if one home wastes money because energy is used at the wrong time, that is annoying. If millions of homes do it, that is a massive waste.
Homes consume energy when they could wait. They export energy when they could use it. They run heavy loads when the grid is already stressed. They miss simple opportunities to use local solar.
Not because people are careless. Not because the hardware is bad. Because there is no shared control layer.
Once you see that waste, it is very hard to unsee.
If this sounds obvious
If you read this and think, "Yes. Why doesn't my home already do this?", then you are exactly the kind of person we want to talk to.
GridPassport is still early. Your setup may or may not be supported yet. We may ask questions, look at data, test things and learn together.
But if you have solar and a home battery, you are close to the first kind of home we want to understand deeply. If you also have AC, a heat pump, hot water storage, EV charging or another serious power device, you can help shape what comes next.
Homes can use energy better. They can save money, increase comfort, use more of their own solar, protect reserve and avoid bad timing without forcing the owner to become the energy operator.
They need a shared brain for power. That is GridPassport.
One more thing
After nine months of work and a few early versions, one GridPassport version finally felt different. It was solid enough that I stopped treating my own home like something I had to constantly watch.
First came relief. For the first time since installing solar and a battery, I felt that the system was taking care of the home instead of asking me to be the operator.
Then came pride. GridPassport was not just doing the work for me. It was making better decisions than I would have made by hand. Much better. I would not beat it manually. Not even close.
The battery stopped charging to 100% when 100% made no sense. When it did make sense, it charged fully. Energy started selling when the price made the sale worth it, not when the simplest inverter rule happened to say so.
Uffffff.
I wish everybody the same.