With the unfortunate news that ChargeHQ is officially shutting down this month, thousands of Aussie EV owners are suddenly scrambling for a way to manage their excess solar charging.

If you relied on ChargeHQ, you know how crucial smart charging is. Without it, plugging your car in during the day usually leads to a deeply frustrating problem: your EV starts stealing your home battery’s charge.

You plug your Tesla in at midday while the sun is shining. Everything looks great. But then a few heavy clouds roll over. Because your car is pulling a massive 7kW load, your home battery instantly kicks in to make up the shortfall. By the time the sun goes down and the expensive evening peak hits, your home battery is completely flat, and you are forced to buy peak grid power to cook dinner.

Standard solar setups simply aren’t smart enough to differentiate between your kitchen appliances and your car. To fix this, we had to rethink how residential energy flows.

If you are looking for a ChargeHQ alternative this month, here is a look at Gridkeeper’s Solar-Aware Tesla integration, and how it reorders your home’s energy priorities to protect your battery’s state of charge.

The problem: the default priority order

By default, most hybrid inverters operate on a rigid priority list:

  1. Solar production
  2. Home battery, charge or discharge
  3. Grid, import or export to cover the house and the EV

To your inverter, your EV is just another household appliance. It doesn’t care if it drains your home battery to keep the car charging at maximum speed.

The solution: reordering the buckets

Gridkeeper intercepts that behaviour. Instead of treating the house as one giant load, it breaks energy into buckets and reorders where solar goes.

  1. The house. The fridge, the lights, the TV. These always get priority.
  2. The EV. Dynamically matched to the remaining solar.
  3. The home battery. Charged only if there is solar left over.
  4. The grid. Exporting only when the other three buckets are full.

Gridkeeper acts as the logic engine, ensuring your excess solar fills the right buckets in the right order.

How dynamic solar ramping works

Say solar is producing 8kW and the house is using 1kW. That leaves 7kW of excess solar. Gridkeeper tells the Tesla to charge at exactly 7kW. If a cloud rolls over and solar drops to 4kW, Gridkeeper ramps the car down to 3kW to match.

The car only charges on genuine excess solar, so the home battery is not drained to top up the vehicle. If there is more solar than the car can take, it spills into the battery.

When a cloud rolls over, Gridkeeper instantly ramps your EV's charge rate down to match production.

Tesla’s paid API

Tesla restricted their official API and started charging for access. Because Gridkeeper uses that API to ramp charge rate, the Tesla integration has a small fee. Heavy commands, like waking the car from deep sleep, use more tokens. Lightweight commands, like nudging the amps as a cloud passes, use very few.

You pay for the tokens you use. Depending on charging habits, that averages about AUD $5 a month. A flat home battery that forces you onto peak grid power at 40c/kWh makes that fee back in the first few days.

Move your charging across

You bought a home battery to power the house when energy is expensive, not to dump it into the car at noon. Link your Tesla and your inverter in Gridkeeper to protect state of charge and automate excess solar.

Open Gridkeeper