Value & Logic

Less, but Alva Link still works. Savings come primarily from price arbitrage, so flat days offer less to shift. On those days, solar self-consumption routing, fuse management, weather-predictive heating, and battery health optimisation all keep running. Winter is where the volatility — and most of the annual savings — concentrates. The €122–€1,350 annual range already accounts for seasonal variation.

Alva Link is purpose-built — no touchscreen, no general-purpose smart home hub ambitions, no mandatory installation visit. €99 at pre-order (€249 retail) compares to €599 for 1KOMMA5° Heartbeat, €399 for Homey Pro, and €249.99 for tado° Heat Pump Optimizer X. Narrow focus keeps the bill of materials low. The €99 price is limited to the first 1,000 customers.

Alva Link finds the cheapest way to charge — overnight grid, midday solar, or both. Set a departure time and Autopilot handles SOC-aware scheduling using your car's cloud API. With solar, surplus is routed to the EV before export. With a battery in the mix, excess solar can store and transfer to the car hours later. Load balancing prevents fuse trips at every tier.

Essential is free forever — local control, manual scheduling, fuse protection, live monitoring, and bridge mode. Autopilot (€4.99/mo or €49/yr) adds automatic price optimization, weather-predictive control, battery arbitrage, and cloud-connected EV scheduling. Most homeowners save €120–280 per year with Autopilot. Cancel anytime.

Yes — Alva Link is provider-agnostic. Stay with Tibber, Vattenfall, Eneco, or whoever you use today. A dynamic spot-price tariff gives you the full savings potential, since the optimisation shifts load across cheap and expensive hours. On a fixed-price contract you still get solar self-consumption, fuse management, and comfort scheduling, just without price arbitrage.

Depends on your setup. With Autopilot (€49/year), typical annual savings are €122–€282 for a heat pump alone, €270–€570 with heat pump plus EV, and €700–€1,350 for a full solar-battery-EV-heat-pump system. Multi-asset setups exceed the sum of individual savings because coordination unlocks bonuses no single device can deliver. The app shows verified savings against your actual tariff every month.

Your home already stores heat — concrete floors, walls, and heating water all act as thermal mass. A well-insulated home with underfloor heating can be pre-heated 1–2°C during cheap hours and coast for 3–6 hours without the heat pump running. Autopilot learns your home's specific thermal profile over weeks and calculates safe pre-heating windows. Comfort stays flat while the bill drops.

Yes — the heat pump is where the biggest savings live, not solar. A typical heat pump draws 8,000–15,000 kWh per year, and Alva Link shifts that load to cheap hours using your home's thermal mass. Expected savings: €122–€282 per year with just a heat pump and a dynamic tariff. Solar is a bonus, not a requirement.

Autopilot anticipates spikes rather than reacting to them. Day-ahead prices arrive at 13:00 CET, and Autopilot immediately builds a 24-hour plan using your home's thermal mass, battery state, EV schedule, and hot water as flexibility buffers. Consumption is front-loaded into cheap hours so your house coasts through peaks on stored energy. Intraday price updates trigger real-time recalculation.

P1 dongles read your meter — Alva Link controls your devices. That's the core difference. A meter reader shows you what's happening but changes nothing. Alva Link connects directly to the heat pump, EV charger, inverter, and battery using industrial protocols, then decides when each runs based on prices, weather, and your preferences. Monitoring vs. action.