Frequently Asked Questions

Joule Genie is a smart energy management platform that connects your solar inverter, home battery, EV charger, and energy tariff into one intelligent system. It automatically optimises when to charge and discharge your battery to minimise your energy costs.

Every 5 minutes, the optimiser analyses your solar forecast, battery state, energy rates, and household consumption. It calculates the cheapest possible schedule for the next 24 hours and sends it directly to your inverter.

Shadow mode lets you see exactly what the optimiser would do without actually sending commands to your hardware. It's a risk-free way to evaluate the system before going live. You can switch between shadow and active mode at any time.

No. The setup wizard guides you through connecting each piece of hardware step by step. You just need your account credentials for each service (e.g. SunSynk Connect, Octopus Energy).

SunSynk is fully tested with complete read/write control. Solis and SolarEdge integrations have been developed and are currently in testing. GivEnergy, Tesla Powerwall, and others are on our roadmap.

Currently Octopus Energy Agile is fully supported, with half-hourly import and export rates. Support for other variable tariffs is planned.

Yes! Register your interest and tell us what hardware you have. We prioritise new integrations based on demand. You can also indicate if you're willing to help us test new integrations.

Yes. We provide a custom Home Assistant integration that exposes 11 sensor entities. It works with the HA Energy Dashboard out of the box, and we include importable full and mini Lovelace dashboards.

For most homes today, yes. What you pay depends on your kit. If any part of your setup is an integration we are still proving, your household is free while that is true. If your inverter can only be read and not controlled, it stays free. Once every part of your setup is kit we have verified end to end — SunSynk, Octopus Energy and Pod Point today — it is £44.99 a year, or £4.99 a month. Nothing is held back from the free bands: the band decides what you pay, never what you can use.

It depends on your battery size, tariff, solar generation and how much you use — so rather than quote an average we cannot yet stand behind, we show you the working. Every day we price what you actually paid against two baselines: no battery at all, and your inverter running its own timer. Once your supplier settles the day, both come from your half-hourly meter readings rather than an estimate. On our own home — Octopus Agile, 10kWh battery, 61 settled days — the median day cost £1.71 less than the same day on a typical timer, and the timer won on 8 of those days. That is one household, not a forecast for yours. See How We Measure for the full method.

Nothing has graduated yet — everything we support outside the verified list is still in beta. When an integration does become verified, households on it keep three more months free and then pay £2.99 a month, locked for as long as they stay, rather than the standard £4.99. It is lower because you helped us verify that integration. You will not find out from a bill: we email you when the free period starts and again two weeks before it ends, and if you decide not to subscribe we keep showing you everything and simply stop sending changes to your kit.

All integration credentials are encrypted at rest using industry-standard encryption. We never store passwords in plain text. Communication with all third-party APIs happens over TLS.

Yes. You can disconnect any integration at any time from the settings page. This immediately stops all communication with that service.

We collect energy readings (solar, battery, grid), tariff rates, and vehicle state of charge. This data is used solely to optimise your energy usage and calculate savings. We do not sell your data to third parties.

Your inverter continues to operate normally with its last programmed schedule. When connectivity is restored, the optimiser will recalculate and update the schedule on its next cycle.

The optimiser runs every 5 minutes per inverter. If conditions change — unexpected cloud cover, a rate spike, or your EV being plugged in — the schedule adapts within minutes.

Yes. The optimiser considers both import and export rates when building the schedule. If export rates are high, it may choose to discharge to the grid rather than storing energy.