ChargeHQ is Shutting Down: Here is Your Replacement (With Native Home Battery Protection)

Without smart automation, charging your EV during the day will drain your home battery.

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 new Solar-Aware Tesla Integration—and how it completely 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 very rigid, "dumb" priority list. The flow of energy looks like this:

1. Solar Production

2. Home Battery (Charge/Discharge)

3. Grid (Import/Export to cover house and EV load)

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

The Solution: Reordering the "Buckets"

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

To solve this, we built a logic engine into Gridkeeper that actively intercepts this behaviour. Instead of treating your house as one giant load, Gridkeeper breaks your energy into dynamic buckets and reorders the priority of where your solar goes.

With Gridkeeper enabled, the new priority order becomes:

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: (Only charged if there is solar left over).

4. The Grid: (Exporting only when the other three buckets are full).

How Dynamic Solar Ramping Actually Works

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

Let’s say your solar is producing 8kW, and your house is using 1kW. That leaves 7kW of excess solar.

Gridkeeper talks directly to your Tesla and tells it to charge at exactly 7kW. If a cloud rolls over and solar production drops to 4kW, Gridkeeper instantly ramps your Tesla’s charge rate down to 3kW to match.

The result? Your EV dynamically breathes in and out with the sun. It only ever charges using genuine excess solar, meaning your home battery is never drained to top up the car. If there is more solar than the car can take, it gracefully spills into the next bucket to charge your home battery.

The Elephant in the Room: Tesla’s Paid API

A major factor shaking up the EV software space right now (and a massive hurdle for indie developers) is that Tesla restricted their official API this year and started charging for access.

Because we rely on this API to ramp your car's charge rate up and down, we do have to charge a small fee to use the Tesla integration. However, we wanted to make it as fair and transparent as possible, so we built a Token System.

Not all API calls cost the same. Heavy commands—like waking the Tesla up from a deep sleep—use more tokens. Lightweight commands—like simply nudging the charging amps up or down as a cloud passes—use very few.

Because you only pay for the tokens you actually use, it is incredibly cheap. Depending on your charging habits, it averages out to circa AUD $5 per month.

When you consider that a flat home battery forces you to buy expensive peak grid power at 40c+ per kWh, that $5 pays for itself in the first few days of the month.

Seamlessly Transition Your Charging

You bought a home battery to power your house when energy is expensive, not to dump it into your car at noon.

If you are looking for a home for your EV now that ChargeHQ is closing its doors, you can link your Tesla and your inverter to Gridkeeper today to protect your battery’s state of charge and truly automate your excess solar.

Start automating your energy at www.dusk.energy.