Most home solar systems will export on sunny days; our system regularly exports 20+ kWh on a summers day. But solar systems in the UK generate 15% to 20% of their summer output in the winter and obviously our electricity use is much higher in the winter. A customer asked me how could they save that lovely spare summer energy for the winter. They were asking if there's a way we could 'bank' their solar generated energy to then draw from in the winter. Yes, it's an AI generat

On a Sunday evening you get one of these to exercise your brain. The issue here is that if you want to charge an electric car using any energy supplier's smart tariff low rate period often the wiring means the car will first draw energy from the home battery rather than the grid as the battery is simply doing what it's designed to - meet your home demand. Yesterday (Sunday 12th Oct 2025) this came up on the panel session at Everything Electric too.  I get asked about once a f

But only with a solar system. Our home battery has stored and supplied almost exactly a quarter of our annual electricity use to the 1st October 2025. We've also exported surplus solar, and run some grid-trade during March to September too. Our system is a 5kWp solar system with 13.5kWh battery and we have an electric car (almost exclusively charged at home) & an air source heat pump. Our home is a 4-bed 1960s house (reasonable insulation) with 3 teenagers that enjoy long hot

We love trees and we love wind turbines. So we’ve created some tech that combines the two in order to bring invisible renewable energy to a tree near you. Image https://unsplash.com/@mahkeo on https://unsplash.com/ I’m not talking about sticking a wind turbine poking out of the top of a tree - that would be ridiculous. Inspired by the flexibility of electric wallpaper and the graceful movement of tidal energy generators we’ve created a material that can be wrapped around the

Image https://unsplash.com/@andywatkins on https://unsplash.com Yesterday Whitby residents were given the choice of staying with Natural...

Yes: If you buy a new home in a few years time the chances are it will be built to the forthcoming Future Homes Standard 2025 and should...

Security is often top of mind when making hardware - no one wants their data stolen, device used as part of a bot-net or their controls...

At events I've spoken recently at I've started to refer to heat pumps as an energy generator so want to explain why. If it feels wrong to...

This was the third Fully Charged Live I’ve attended and the second I’ve spoken at. I was invited to talk about energy disruption and what’s coming next so chose to focus on storage. Storage is going to become important because our energy generation is becoming more intermittent and geographically highly distributed which means we’ll either need appliances to be far more dynamic reacting to that or storage soaking up the rises and falls, or most likely a mix of both. On avera

In 2021 we saw a range of long term plans and consultation papers published by BEIS. Where do we start The best place to start is the...

Our experience of charging an EV isn't perfect but it's probably typical and that's something we're working hard to improve with new offers such as Intelligent Octopus. I'm on one of our Go Faster tariffs so I charge the car during the cheap period. However I've also set the car to reach only 80% to keep the battery in condition and I've got a smart charger that takes the Go Faster tariff via our API and decides when to charge. As a result the car app complains it's not rece

I started nCube in 2013 as a smart home platform. From the beginning the focus was always on energy management based around a smart home...

We moved house a year ago (April 2021) and one of the things I was keen to do was move off our gas combi boiler to an Air Source Heat...