On 1 November 2026 the National Electricity Market (NEM), the grid that covers Queensland, New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, started the main release of its Flexible Trading Arrangements. From now on an EV charger, a home battery or another controllable device can be metered and settled separately from the rest of th
FRITZ! GmbH, the Berlin company formerly known as AVM, announced on 2 November 2026 that its FRITZ!Smart Energy 201 smart plug is now in shops. The recommended retail price is €49. It is an indoor plug, small enough to fit into a power strip, with a single combined LED and button.
Homebridge 2.5.0 was published on GitHub on 1 November 2026 at 15:38 Warsaw time. It is the first feature release since 2.4.0 in mid-August, and most of the changelog concerns the Matter side of Homebridge: new device types for home energy, more modes for climate devices and a long list of fixes to the accessory cache.
Plenty of heat pump spec sheets carry a small "SG Ready" logo. It sounds like a smart grid protocol, and people expect an app, a cloud service or at least a network port behind it. What you actually get is two terminals on the controller board. You close or open them with a relay, and the heat pump changes the way it runs.
MCS, the UK certification scheme for small-scale renewable installations, is consulting on its first product standard for battery storage. The draft, MCS 042, covers home and small commercial batteries. As ESS News reported on 30 October 2026, it could bring IoT cybersecurity requirements into the certification that battery makers need to sell thro
Tesla Energy announced Heat Pump Optimization for Powerwall 3 and Powerwall 3P in Europe on 30 October 2026. The feature lets the battery system tell a heat pump to run harder when the roof produces more solar power than the house uses, or when grid electricity is cheap. In its post Tesla called the heat pump "one of the biggest electrical loads in
When the power goes out, everything in a smart home drops at the same moment: the router, the switch, the machine running your home automation software, the Zigbee or Thread coordinator plugged into it, and the NAS holding its backups. Short outages then turn into long ones, because devices come back in random order and anything that was writing to
A lot of energy hardware already has a local data interface that often goes unused: DIN-rail energy meters, solar inverters, heat pumps and ventilation units often speak Modbus. The protocol comes from industrial controllers and needs no cloud or account. Once it works, you can poll voltage, power and energy counters as often as the device allows.
Renesas announced the RL78/G21 on 28 October 2026, a new 16-bit microcontroller aimed at the control boards inside air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines and microwave ovens. It is not a wireless chip. It is the part that runs the motor, compressor and sensor logic, sitting next to whatever Wi-Fi or Thread module makes the appliance "sma
