I first started my journey into home automation about 3 years ago. I’d just had Solar PV fitted on my roof and wanted to make the most of the excess energy that was being generated.

In the UK you get paid for how much energy you generate from your solar per KWh. You also get paid for how much you export to the grid, however if your system is under 4KW you don’t have to have a separate export meter, just a generation meter. It’s just estimated that you export 50% of what you generate. With this in mind its in your interests to use all the power you generate on site. So I started to look at ways to do this.

I stated looking, and there are may bespoke systems out there that can do this, even store the power to batteries for use later. It was at this point that a friend mentioned home automation, someone he knew was using some X10 kit and that may do what I need. We then both started looking and came across the Zwave protocol for home automation and the massive number of devices that “talk Zwave”. For both of us this is where our journey began…