Next Optimise explained: We answer your top five solar and battery questions.

If you've got solar panels and a home battery, you're already ahead of most households. You've made the investment, and on sunny days especially, you'll have seen the benefits. But most home batteries are only doing part of the job. Without active management, they typically follow a fixed plan - charging from solar or the grid, and discharging at the same times every day, regardless of what energy prices are doing.

Next Optimise changes that. It connects to your battery and manages it automatically around wholesale tracked half-hourly energy prices, finding the best moments to charge, discharge and export. The result could be more value from the equipment you already own, without any extra effort on your part. Here's what you need to know before you get started.

1. "What if it leaves my battery empty when I actually need it?"

Next Optimise doesn't treat your battery like a trading asset with no regard for how you actually live. The system factors in your household usage patterns and the time of day when making decisions, and it takes into account any minimum thresholds you set up, so as not to discharge your battery too much.

What it does do is make smarter decisions about when to charge from the grid, when to use stored energy, and when to export. The goal is to find value in the market without disrupting how your home runs.

It's worth being clear that Next Optimise is an energy optimisation service rather than a backup power guarantee. If maintaining a specific minimum charge at all times is important to you, the product settings are worth looking at carefully when you get set up.

2. "Won't all that charging and discharging wear my battery out faster?"

Batteries degrade with use, so surely more activity means a shorter lifespan?

The reality is more nuanced. What tends to damage lithium batteries isn't how often they cycle, it's how they are used. Consistently charging to 100% and leaving them fully topped up, regularly running them completely flat, and charging at very high rates are the things that cause the most wear over time. Operating within a sensible middle range, which is what Next Optimise is designed to do, may mean lower rates of degradation in the long term.

The technology behind Next Optimise comes from Amber Electric, the most popular battery automation software in Australia, currently the world's most advanced market for home solar and batteries. The system has been refined across a huge range of real-world conditions and different battery setups. How the algorithm treats your battery hardware is something that's been carefully thought through, not bolted on as an afterthought.

3. "Will I lose power in a blackout if the system is in control?"

This concern is understandable, but it's worth unpicking because it's not really about Next Optimise at all.

Whether your battery can keep your home running independently during a power cut comes down to your inverter and how your system was originally installed. Most standard solar battery setups in the UK aren't configured for islanding (running off-grid when the wider network goes down), because doing it safely requires specific hardware and significant rewiring of your property. That's a decision that was made when your system was installed, not something that changes when you sign up to an energy service.

Next Optimise connects to your battery and optimises how it charges and discharges during normal grid operation. It doesn't alter your underlying hardware configuration, and it doesn't affect whatever backup capability your system already has or doesn't have. If you have home backup installed, then you may wish to set a higher minimum state of battery charge in your settings, to reserve more in the event of a power cut, but note that this will reduce the amount of battery available for Next Optimise, which will correspondingly reduce your savings.

If blackout resilience is something you're keen to have, it's a conversation worth having with your original installer about your inverter setup, rather than something to factor into your energy tariff decision.

4. "I already manage my battery manually, so do I actually need this?"

Some battery owners are genuinely hands-on with their setup. They watch price forecasts, adjust timers, keep an eye on the weather and shift their usage accordingly. And that effort does make a real difference compared to leaving everything on a factory default schedule.

The question is whether manual management can keep up with how the market actually moves.

Wholesale electricity prices change every 30 minutes, every hour of every day. They're driven by how much wind is generating across the country, how much solar output there is, what gas prices are doing, how much electricity is being imported or exported through undersea cables to Europe, and how much demand there is on the network at any given moment. Tracking all of that and making the right call consistently, including at 3am when overnight prices occasionally drop sharply, is genuinely hard to do.

Next Optimise is making those decisions every half hour, around the clock, based on real-time data and forward-looking price forecasts. It doesn't miss windows because you were busy, or forget to adjust when the forecast changes overnight.

5. "Is this something I'll have to keep on top of?"

Setting up a new energy service and then having to actively manage it would rather defeat the point. The good news is that once Next Optimise is running, there's very little that needs your attention. It takes a couple of weeks to ‘learn’ how you use energy in your home, then the optimisation really comes into its own.

You don't need to watch prices or know when to intervene. You don't need to change your daily routine or think about when to run the dishwasher. You don't need to understand how the wholesale market works or what a half hourly settlement period is.

The app gives you a clear view of what the system has been doing and what you've saved, and many customers find that genuinely interesting to look at. But it's there because people are curious, not because anything requires your input. The decisions are happening automatically in the background, and you just carry on as normal.

That's the whole idea. A home battery should make your energy cheaper without making your life more complicated.

Ready to get more from your battery?

Next Optimise is open to any household with solar panels and a compatible home battery. 

Get a quote for Next Optimise today

Please note: Savings figures are based on data from our early pilot and modelled projections. Actual savings will vary depending on your energy usage, equipment, tariff, and market conditions. Past performance is not a guarantee of future savings.