The whole idea in one sentence: the surplus solar you currently sell to the grid for a few cents a unit is worth far more in your car's battery — so ChargeSense puts it there instead, automatically.
ChargeSense is for a Tesla charged from a third-party (non-Sigenergy) charger: a Tesla Wall Connector, the Tesla mobile connectorplugged into an ordinary socket, or any other brand of charger. None of them know anything about your solar, and your Sigenergy system can't control any of them — so we control the car instead, over Tesla's own API. That makes whatever charger you already have solar-aware, with nothing new on the wall. (Sigenergy's own AC charger already does this natively with the inverter — it doesn't need us.)
Your solar goes to your house first, then your home battery, and whatever is left is exported. That surplus moves constantly: a cloud, the kettle, the dishwasher finishing. If you just plug the car in, it charges at full power and pulls the difference from the grid — you pay retail for what you could have used for free.
ChargeSense reads your Sigenergy system every 30 seconds and matches the car's charging rate to your actual surplus, right now: up when the sun comes out, down when the oven goes on, paused when there's nothing spare, resumed when there is. Your house and home battery always get first call — we only ever use what was heading to the grid.
You approve us through Sigenergy — we never ask for your password. Tell us your system ID, and Sigenergy will email the address that owns your system asking whether ChargeSense may read it. Nothing reaches us until you click approve, and you can withdraw it later from the same place.
In the mySigen app: Settings → System Settings → About
This page keeps checking, so you can leave it open or come back to it.
Some homes have panels running through a separate inverter alongside the Sigenergy system, and Sigenergy's data feed doesn't report that generation to us. Your charging is unaffected. We don't match your car to a solar reading — we match it to what your home is actually exporting to the grid, and that measurement already includes every panel you own, whichever inverter they run through.
What it does affect is the solar number on your dashboard and your daily generation totals, which will read lower than reality. We notice this on your own readings and flag it rather than leaving you puzzling over a chart that disagrees with your roof.
The one you already prefer. We've tested against both Self Consumption and Sigen AI and both work, so there is nothing to change on your system — and we never change it ourselves.
What the mode changes is when the car gets its share. A mode that manages the battery itself decides when to store and when to release, so the spare solar shows up at different times of day than it would under Self Consumption. We follow the surplus your system actually leaves rather than predicting it, so the car charges when it is there. If you run a different mode, please tell us what you see; that feedback is the point of a beta.
During setup we ask where your car charger is wired. It matters more than it sounds: it decides whether your Sigenergy system can see the car or not, and therefore whether the export figure we read is the true surplus or one that shrinks the moment we start charging.
mySigen shows no change at all when the car charges.
The car is outside the dashed box, so export stays honest while it charges. We can point the car straight at your surplus — full solar-following.
mySigen counts the car as household usage. Always true for a portable charger in a normal socket.
The car is inside the dashed box: the moment it charges, your export appears to vanish. Following it naively would chase its own tail, so we don't — schedules and force charge work, and solar-following waits for the closed-loop version.
Don't know? Say so — that's the honest answer for most people, and we work it out for you. Solar-following stays off until we're sure it will behave; schedules and force charge work from day one either way.
That is the whole of it for most people. If you want the full picture — every setting, its default, and when it is actually worth changing — there is a complete reference further down.
You can ignore all of this. The defaults are the ones we run at home, and most people set a battery limit once and never open Settings again. But if you want to know exactly what each control does — and, more usefully, when it is worth changing — here is the lot, grouped the way your own Settings page groups them.
The controls you actually use day to day.
Solar follows your excess and runs your schedules — the normal setting. Charge now charges immediately at the rate you pick, sun or not. Stop stops and stays stopped. Off means we send your car no commands at all.
Use Charge now the night before a trip. Use Off if you ever want to be certain we are not touching anything — it is a genuine off switch, not a pause.
Two separate ceilings, not a range. The Solar limit applies when the car is charging on excess sun; the Schedule limit applies to scheduled windows and to Charge now. We set the limit on the car itself at the start of each session, so the car enforces it even if we vanish mid-charge.
Solar is free, so people often let it run to 90% or 100% while keeping the overnight and Charge-now limit at 60–70% — you pay for those, and a lithium pack prefers not to sit full.
Nightly windows — say 23:00–02:00 on a cheap tariff — each with its own charging rate. Inside a window we charge regardless of sun; when the window ends we stop immediately rather than drifting on.
Add one if you are on a time-of-use tariff, or if you need a guaranteed state of charge by morning that the weather cannot be trusted to deliver.
Settings → Connections. Set once during setup.
A Tesla starts charging at full power the moment you plug it in. With this on, we stop that within seconds so your kWh wait for sunshine or your schedule instead of pouring in at retail price. Solar or a schedule then restarts the charge under our control when it makes sense.
DC fast charging is never touched, at a Supercharger or anywhere else — road trips are none of our business.
Turn it off if you also charge at home from something we do not know about — a battery-backed circuit, a second tariff, a generator — and you would rather the car simply do its own thing.
Settings → Site. Facts about your house, not preferences — these are the numbers everything else is calculated from.
Which side of your Sigenergy sensors the charger is wired on — the question with the diagrams above. It decides which control law we can safely run, so until it is settled, solar-following stays off and schedules and Charge now carry the load.
Leave it on the automatic setting unless your electrician has told you plainly where the charger is fed from. We infer it from your own readings, and a wrong answer here is worse than no answer.
Once it is settled — by you, or by the wiring test — we leave it alone. We keep checking it against every real charging session and tell you if it stops matching, but we will not change it behind your back: an occasional odd reading is far more often a passing cloud or a heat pump than a rewired switchboard.
Your charger's supply, not your house's — a three-phase house very often has a single-phase charger. Every conversion between kilowatts and amps divides by this number, so it is the single most consequential field on the page.
Only if you know your charger is wired across three phases. Set it to single-phase when it is really three and we will command a third of the amps you meant; set it to three when it is really one and we will command three times as many.
Schedule windows and daily totals bucket on your midnight rather than ours.
If you move, or if your daily figures look shifted by a few hours.
Used only for the clear-sky forecast line on your dashboard. Nothing about your charging depends on them.
Tune until the forecast matches what your roof actually does on a cloudless day. Performance is the catch-all for shading, dust, heat and inverter losses — drop it if the forecast reads high.
Settings → Advanced charging control, behind the disclosure triangle. Every one of these has a sensible default, and there is a Reset to defaults button if you want the tuning ones back.
The floor and ceiling we will ever command. Below the floor we stop rather than trickle; above the ceiling we simply never ask.
You do not need to lower the maximum to match a smaller cable. We watch what the car actually draws and learn the real limit — a 10 A mobile connector on a 32 A setting is spotted within a few readings, and forgotten again when you unplug it.
Raise the floor if your car is fussy about very low currents. Lower the ceiling if your charger circuit is rated below what the car would otherwise ask for. Five amps is the lowest either can go: no Tesla will charge below roughly that, and asking for less just means the car quietly draws more than we allowed.
A ceiling on everything you import at once, so the car is throttled — or paused — rather than let the house trip its main breaker. Set it to what your main can carry: a 63 A single-phase main at 230 V is about 14.5 kW.
It counts grid import, which is what the main breaker actually carries: your house, your car, and anything the grid is putting into your home battery on a cheap overnight rate. Solar and battery output do not count against it, because they join your switchboard downstream of the main breaker — so a house running off its own roof is never throttled by this. When the house does get hungry, the car is pulled back on the next reading rather than waiting out the usual anti-flapping delays.
Worth setting if your main is modest, or if you have a big battery that charges from the grid overnight at the same time the car does. On three phases, note that this is a limit on your house total — we get no per-phase figure from Sigenergy, so set it off your weakest phase.
Stop charging the car once your house battery falls this low, so an overnight schedule can run off the battery without emptying it before sunrise. It applies to solar, schedules and Charge now alike, and it releases a few percent above the floor so a battery sitting exactly on the line does not start and stop the car all night.
Set it if you charge the car overnight and want the house to keep a reserve. It does nothing where the charger is upstream of the inverter — the house battery cannot feed the car there, and your Settings page says so if that is you.
Only shown when your charger sits behind the inverter. Blank means house battery first: the car only gets sun that would otherwise have been sold. Set a level — 80%, say — and once the house battery is above it, sun going into the battery counts as the car's too.
Set it if your battery is usually full by early afternoon and you would rather the car started earlier than have the last of the charge go to the grid. The car starts sooner; the battery fills a little slower.
Four more numbers decide how twitchy the loop is: the start threshold (how much spare power must be there before a session begins at all), the start/stop debounce (how many consecutive readings must agree — four, at one every 30 seconds, is about two minutes of steady surplus, and it is what stops a passing cloud ending your charge), the minimum seconds between adjustments (a floor on how often we re-command the car, because Tesla's API is rate-limited), and the amp deadband (how far off target the rate must drift before we correct it, so the loop does not chase every flicker in your household load).
These four interact with each other and with your charger's supply — a start threshold below what your minimum amps can actually draw, for instance, can never do anything, and on a three-phase charger that floor is three times what the number looks like. So we tune them per site rather than leaving them out for a wrong combination to be typed in. The whole-home power limit deliberately ignores the adjustment interval when it needs to throttle down — a breaker will not wait out a delay of ours.
Tell us what the car is doing that you would rather it did not — starting on sun that does not last, fidgeting through cloud, taking too long to react — and we will move them and say what we changed.
If a setting here does not match what you see, or you change one and the result surprises you, please tell us — contact@chargesense.app. Every default on this page came from someone's real roof, and the ones that are wrong are the ones we have not heard about yet.
When you plug in, the car normally starts charging immediately at full power. ChargeSense pauses that within seconds, so your kWh wait for sunshine or your schedule instead of pouring in from the grid. If you actually wanted to charge right away, one tap on Force Charge does it. Superchargers and other DC fast charging are never touched — road trips are none of our business.
Control home charging from ChargeSense rather than the Tesla app. While the mode is anything but Off we are setting the rate and starting or stopping the car ourselves, so a change made in Tesla's app is overridden within a minute and looks like the car ignoring you. Offhands it back completely, whenever you want it back.
Plug in, then leave it. Expect charging to begin once your export passes a small threshold and to stay off entirely on a dull day. Watch the dashboard: the flow diagram shows the sun going into the house and the surplus going into the car, and the amps will step up and down through the day. That's it working — a car that charges in bursts and idles under clouds is doing exactly what you asked. If you need a guaranteed full battery, use a schedule or force charge; that's what they're for.
There's no app store download. The dashboard installs straight from the browser and then opens like any other app — its own icon, full screen, no address bar, straight to your dashboard:
You stay signed in, so it's one tap to see what the car is doing. It's the same dashboard either way — nothing is stored on the phone, and uninstalling the icon changes nothing about your charging.
Nothing, while we're in beta. We intend to charge a small monthly fee once it leaves beta, and you'll hear about it with plenty of warning — no surprise billing, ever.
Email contact@chargesense.app — a real person who built this reads it. Or request early access.