How it works

An operating system for energy flows

The easiest way to understand Energy Autopilot is this: it’s an operating system for the energy flows of your home or office. Energy Autopilot coordinates everything in your home that makes, stores, or consumes energy — so they work as one system rather than a collection of gadgets.

It does this through a hybrid architecture with two cooperating parts:

The FMS thinks; the Servo acts. The split is what gives the platform its flexibility: the logical layer can grow ever smarter in the cloud, while the physical layer stays fast, local, and yours.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

Most energy automation today is point solutions: a solar-aware EV charger here, a battery optimiser there, a smart hot water timer somewhere else — each making locally sensible decisions in ignorance of the others. Point solutions don’t just miss opportunities; they actively conflict. Your EV charger chases solar at the same moment your battery optimiser wants that energy, and neither knows the other exists.

Energy Autopilot orchestrates holistically: solar, battery, EV charging (with vehicle-to-grid designed in for when it arrives), and the big controllable loads — air conditioning, hot water, pool pumps — all planned together, as one system with one objective: the best outcome for your whole home. The savings from coordination are ones no collection of separate gadgets can reach.

Why hybrid beats cloud-only

Cloud-only energy platforms share an unavoidable weakness: they’re far away. Every observation and every command crosses the internet, through vendor clouds, with delays measured in seconds to minutes. The Servo changes the physics of the problem — it’s in your home, seeing and responding to your energy environment almost instantly.

That speed isn’t a luxury. Consider your main grid circuit breaker: an EV charging hard, the oven on, hot water heating, and the air conditioner kicking in can together demand more than your grid connection can supply. A cloud-only system can’t see that developing and can’t respond in time. The Servo can — actively managing competing loads in the moment to protect your circuit breaker from tripping. Read more on why local control matters.

Energy Autopilot Architecture

• Continuous data logging — the system records performance statistics at all times, to power predicted energy flows and to allow for later analysis and charting of system performance
• The Decision Engine — determines the best actions to take, and shows you the reason for the decision it has made
• The Power Control Loop — runs continuously on the Servo, ensuring timely control of all devices and providing immediate protective responses if conditions change rapidly and put stress on your grid connection as a result
• The EV Charge Controller — delivers charging for Electric Vehicles to suit your charging cost and timing objectives
• Automated load shedding and automated load activation — in response to changing grid prices over time

The decision engine is driven by Lua scripts you can read — and modify, if you’re so inclined. Planning is moving to a mathematical optimiser (MILP) with every plan annotated at the source, so the explanation you read is the actual reason a decision was made. Improvements you make can be contributed back for other users — that’s our open source adjacent philosophy at work.

Lift the hood

We call our philosophy open source adjacent. If you have a better idea for how your home should be run, you can try it. And if it works, you can contribute it back for every other user to benefit from. Automation you can read is automation you can trust; automation you can improve is something more — a platform.

We believe in open, interoperable Consumer Energy Resources

What we do — and how well we can do it — depends on one thing: each item of Consumer Energy Resources (CER) equipment in your home — solar inverters, batteries, EV chargers, air conditioners, hot water heaters and more — having an open, documented, stable, and zero-cost way to control it, directly, over the local network.

When equipment meets that bar, we can orchestrate it beautifully. When it doesn’t, owners lose: locked into vendor apps, vendor clouds and vendor pricing for control of hardware they already own. That’s why we advocate for open, interoperable CER. You can see a more detailed explanation of why this matters through the links on our About page.

Ready to see it on your own system? Register your interest — beta invitations go out to our mailing list first.