Crowdergy
Hardware & safety
Crowdergy doesn’t switch your devices.It shifts when they run anyway.
The most common question before going live isn’t “how much will I save?” but “what are you doing to my heat pump?”. This page answers it without marketing: what we can technically do at all, which limits are hard-wired, and what happens when we fail.
Measured, not claimed
Most devices cycle before we even arrive
We counted in the field what home batteries and heat pumps do without optimisation. The result changed our own model: wear has since been a cost item the optimisation accounts for — not a side effect it ignores.
2–4→0
Direction changes of the home battery per hour
Measured over one night: charging and discharging every quarter hour, state of charge constant, economic gain zero. That is around 0.38 full charge cycles per night — consumed for nothing. We stopped it.
19→0
Short starts of the heat pump in the test run
Isolated 15-minute pulses, too short for a meaningful compressor run. After introducing the minimum run time: none left — with the identical amount of heat.
Architecture
Three things we simply cannot do
The most reliable promise isn’t the one we make, but the one that technically can’t be otherwise. Between Crowdergy and your hardware there are always three layers we cannot bypass.
Address other devices
We write exclusively to the device entries you have mapped yourself. There is no auto-discovery and no self-extension: what you don’t map doesn’t exist for us.
Invent our own values
On/off states and operating modes are written only with the values you stored in the setup wizard. Its input fields take their value range from the device itself — you can’t even enter anything there the device wouldn’t accept.
Bypass the device
Everything goes through the normal Home Assistant commands, never through direct register access. High-pressure switches, over-temperature protection and battery management remain untouched: we set a setpoint, the device decides.
Hard-wired
Our promises, per device type
These limits aren’t settings an optimisation could override — they are part of the computational model and hold in every possible solution.
Heat pump
We never hard-switch it on or off
We only ever set the target temperature that you yourself stored as minimum and maximum. When the compressor starts and how long it runs is decided by the heat pump. Where we modulate a flow temperature, we stay within a fixed corridor of 25 to 55 °C.
Cycling protection
Minimum run time and minimum pause, 30 minutes each
Once started, a device runs for at least half an hour; once stopped, it stays off for at least half an hour. This is a hard constraint in the optimisation, not a filter applied afterwards — and it holds even when short cycling would be cheaper on paper. The hot water tank additionally gets a start/stop band instead of a point target so it finishes a proper run.
Battery
Never below 5 % state of charge, never oscillating for cents
Deep-discharge protection isn’t an optimisation variable but an absolute lower bound. Above it sits a dynamic overnight reserve. And every direction change costs money in our calculation — ageing is priced in, so the battery no longer oscillates for amounts that aren’t worth the wear.
Wallbox
Charging current always between 6 and 16 A, phases first
The current is clamped to the permitted range, and on boxes with phase switching we always write the phase count first, then the current, then the mode. So a single-phase ampere value can never hit a box running on three phases.
Grid control
The minimum power stays guaranteed to you
If your grid operator limits power under §14a EnWG, we never go below the legally guaranteed minimum: 4.2 kW per device under direct control, and under control via Crowdergy a total value for your household that grows with the number of devices. Devices up to 4.2 kW are never throttled. The direct connection to your grid operator’s control box is in development.
When we fail
No command stays in place forever
The second big worry is legitimate: what if your cloud dies and my device is stuck in the last command? That’s why we treat every command as a time-limited loan. When the period expires, your device falls back to its own behaviour — staggered by type of failure:
60 sno contact
Connection dropped
We stop re-writing
The retry loops stop. From here you can operate your device by hand again without us pushing back a minute later.
15 minno contact
Cloud completely offline
Fallback to the safe state
The connector writes the default once: battery back to passive, wallbox to solar charging, provided that mode is mapped. Fixed rule — never a locking or expensive mode on a dead connection, only the autonomous normal behaviour.
45 minno solver run
Connection up, optimisation stalled
All devices back to factory behaviour
The rarer case: we are reachable but the optimisation has stopped computing. Then the backend resets every device to its native behaviour by itself instead of freezing the last plan.
And you can set up your own safety net
The connector reports its connection state as a dedicated sensor in Home Assistant. That lets you write your own automations that take over when Crowdergy fails — independently of us. We deliberately aren’t the only party that can rescue your system.
At any time
You stay in control
- Switchable per device — every device has its own switch, in the app and in Home Assistant. You never have to choose all or nothing.
- Remote control fully off — a central consent flag sits in front of every write. If it’s off, no background routine, no retry loop and no self-healing writes either.
- Every decision readable — for every switching action the app tells you why it was taken, with the quantities that were decisive. No black box you have to believe in.
- We tell you when something’s wrong — if a device doesn’t react as commanded, you see it as a notice. We distinguish harmless cases (the heat pump has its own release time, the car limits itself) from real problems.
Legal notice. Crowdergy controls connected devices through the interfaces you set up. You remain responsible for the operation, maintenance and compliance with the manufacturer’s specifications of your system; before enabling control, check that the switching values and temperature limits you stored suit your device. The figures on this page are measurements from the live operation of individual systems and not a warranted characteristic. This is a convenience translation; the German version prevails.