Autopilot
The best starting mode for most homes. Autopilot decides when to charge, hold, or export by balancing tariff value, home coverage, refill confidence, and your protected minimum battery SoC. Choose Balanced for a calmer default or Aggressive for stronger value seeking.
Private beta rollout
This page explains the mode logic, not just the label.
All of these modes sit inside the same wider platform: daytime EV-battery protection where supported, whole-home reporting, and vendor-safe controls. The difference here is what the battery is trying to optimise once those guardrails are in place.
Battery protection still sits above the mode
If your setup qualifies for the flagship daytime drain fix, that protection remains the first job regardless of the mode selected underneath it.
Mode choice changes the operating priority
The question is not whether the battery can charge or export. The question is what outcome should win when value, reserve, and home demand are competing.
Availability still depends on your stack
Real rollout still depends on inverter control support, telemetry quality, tariff setup, and whether the current private beta safely supports your hardware mix.
Best fit
Best for mixed-device homes where EV charging, battery use, solar output, and heating demand all change across the day.
Primary goal
Balance tariff upside against reserve protection so the battery behaves sensibly across the whole home.
Decision check
Do you want one sensible default that can stay balanced by default, but still offer a more aggressive value-seeking style when you want it?
When this mode wins
- Homes on Agile, Flux, or other dynamic tariffs where the right answer changes through the day.
- Users who want one smart mode instead of juggling separate reserve-first and profit-first options.
- Mixed EV + battery + solar homes where battery timing must stay compatible with the rest of the property.
When another mode is better
- You want a strict home-first policy with no optimiser-led export at all.
- You need fully deterministic fixed-current behaviour for testing or troubleshooting.
- You do not want the battery making autonomous charge, hold, or export decisions.
What it does in practice
- 1
Looks at tariff context, reserve floor, solar forecast, and refill confidence before each charging or export decision.
- 2
Balanced style protects more home coverage before export. Aggressive keeps the same minimum SoC floor but uses less extra export headroom.
- 3
Chooses between charge, hold, or export based on whether later household value is likely to beat the current opportunity.
- 4
Reduces pointless mode switching by keeping one smart mode with a style choice instead of several overlapping value modes.
Guardrails and stop conditions
- Reserve protection and refill checks can stop an otherwise attractive export action.
- Low-confidence telemetry or control safety limits can make the mode hold rather than trade.
- Vendor control restrictions still apply; the mode is not a bypass around unsupported hardware behaviour.
Compare with other smart controls
Most homes should choose the operating goal first, then choose the mode. These related pages make the tradeoffs explicit.
Home First
A simpler home-first mode. It prioritises running the home from your own solar and battery first, minimises grid dependence, and avoids optimiser-led battery export.
Manual Control
A support-style page for advanced users. Manual Control keeps the automation framework in place but follows your fixed current choices more directly, with safety caps and backend guardrails still applied.
Tariff pages where this mode matters
These tariff playbooks are the clearest places to see where this control style becomes commercially relevant.
Octopus Agile automation
Octopus Agile changes import price every half hour. The real question for battery, EV and heat-pump homes is whether the house can respond to those price signals without creating new conflicts.
Octopus Flux battery strategy
Octopus Flux only works well when battery charging, reserve and export behaviour are coordinated properly, because export value is only part of the economics.
Octopus Intelligent Go coordination
Octopus Intelligent Go creates EV-led charging windows, but battery logic, charger behaviour and whole-home demand still need to be interpreted together.
Use cases that usually point toward this mode
These whole-home problems are often where this control strategy becomes the practical answer.
Smart tariff EV charging without home energy conflicts
When EV charging is cheap, it can still be operationally expensive if it competes with battery reserve, heating demand or export value elsewhere in the property.
Solar, battery and EV charging in one app
This is one of the strongest SaaS acquisition pages because the value proposition is simple: stop managing three overlapping energy systems in three different tools.
Whole-home conflict detection for modern energy homes
The more flexible devices a home has, the more valuable it becomes to detect conflicts between them before they show up as cost, lost solar or poor comfort.
Integrations commonly paired with this mode
These integration pages explain the device context where this smart control style usually shows up.
Octopus Energy
Connect Octopus tariffs to turn raw device telemetry into cost-aware actions, daily savings reporting and smarter battery decisions.
myenergi Zappi
Connect your myenergi Zappi charger to see EV charging in context with solar, battery and tariff data instead of guessing whether the car is stealing the cheap window.
Solis
Connect Solis hybrid inverters to 1app.energy to see live solar, battery, grid and home demand in one place, then automate battery charge decisions around tariff windows.
Related reading
Use the overview hub for the big picture, or jump into the comparison blog for a quicker narrative walkthrough.
Smart Controls overview
See the full smart-control model together and use the overview hub to narrow the choice before you commit to one strategy.
Which smart control mode should you use?
Read the comparison blog for a quicker narrative walkthrough of where each mode tends to fit and where it can disappoint.
Product context
The smart control is not the whole product.
These modes decide how the battery should behave. The wider platform still includes the daytime EV-battery fix, whole-home visibility, tariff context, and vendor-safe control paths across the rest of the home.
See the wider productPriority access
Tell us if your home is a fit for Autopilot.
If your setup mixes EV charging, battery storage, solar, and smart tariffs, we can review whether the current rollout supports Autopilot safely.
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