Home energy management company Plentify says its partnership with solar and electrical solutions installer Herholdts to distribute its SolarBot devices in South Africa, has helped customers to gain the maximum efficiency and cost savings from their solar systems.

With solar installation interest having stagnated since loadshedding was suspended in April, Plentify is driving the adoption of its SolarBot technology on the back of significant cost-savings that users can realise from fully using solar capacity and optimally discharging batteries.

Plentify also finds that the vast majority of solar systems are poorly optimised, saying there is a lot of room for improvement.

Plentify CEO Jon Kornik say solar power remains cheaper than grid electricity tariffs for end-users, especially as the cost of solar panels and batteries continues to decline.

However, with optimal energy management, homeowners can use their solar panels and batteries more efficiently using SolarBot, which analyses weather patterns, loadshedding schedules, and customer demand to make smart decisions on when to charge and discharge batteries.

Kornik adds that Plentify builds a digital twin of each solar system by combining weather data and actual system performance data to predict how much energy that specific system has the potential of producing in every moment in time.

This is useful, because solar systems may generate far below their potential: whenever there is insufficient demand to use all available solar energy, the solar will be curtailed.

“By comparing actuals to potentials, we can identify times when solar is being underutilised and use this to inform optimisation decisions.”

SolarBot works best alongside Plentify’s other intelligent management technology, HotBot, which focuses on optimal geyser performance for energy savings.

Notably, excess electricity generated from solar panels can be directed to geysers or underfloor heating in winter to maximise the return on solar investment, Plentify points out.

SolarBot will automatically choose the best battery charge level to ensure uninterrupted power to the home and preservation of the battery for as long as possible. The HotBot and SolarBot devices, when used together, connect to appliances to manage available solar power.

The devices provide information to the Plentify platform, which users can use to monitor and control energy use in their homes.

The platform shows information on real-time energy flows in the home, energy use over time, actual solar generated, consumption coming from solar and grid power, respectively, number of hours of outages that have been survived and money saved from lower grid electricity use.

Plentify says users have reported electricity savings of between R450 and R2 000 a month since using SolarBot, owing to the efficient use of their solar systems and less dependence on the grid. Two users, in particular, have reported increases in their solar utilisation from 68% to 99% and 56% to 83%, respectively.

The Plentify application can also make recommendations on how to improve users’ systems to gain greater efficiency, such as adding more battery capacity or adding other load control.

In turn, installers such as Herholdts benefit from being able to offer a smart optimised solution to maximise customers’ solar investments as well as to proactively provide support if they receive alerts ahead of possible issues on the system.

The SolarBot hardware has built-in diagnostics to identify system upgrades and recommended enhancements, which installers can use to upsell to customers to ultimately get cheaper solar power.

The purchase of the devices includes a 12-month subscription to Plentify’s monitoring and management service, following which users can opt to continue subscribing to the service or use the free version of the application with limited features.