Charge HQ Alternatives in Australia: How to Keep Charging Your EV on Solar

The best Charge HQ alternative depends on what you already own. If you have a Tesla and an Amber account, Amber for EVs does most of what Charge HQ did. With a Powerwall, Tesla’s own Smart Charging now handles solar charging for any EV. If you have neither, the options are a solar-aware wall charger, a self-hosted tool like evcc or Home Assistant, or simply scheduling your car to charge in the middle of the day.

Charge HQ was the Australian app that matched an EV’s charging to spare rooftop solar. Amber bought it, then shut it down on 7 September 2026. Its users lost the automation that made their solar go into the car instead of the grid.

This guide covers each replacement, what it needs, and what it costs. For the hardware side, our EV charger comparison lists solar-aware chargers sold in Australia.

Why Charge HQ closed and what it did

Charge HQ closed because Amber shifted its focus to vehicle-to-grid and whole-home energy management. Co-founder Jay Banyer said running it as a separate product no longer made sense. Fees stopped when the closure was announced in July 2026. Users were told to download their charging history and to set their car or charger back to its default behaviour after the shutdown.

The app did one job well. It read your solar inverter, worked out how much power you were exporting, and told your car or charger to charge at that rate. When a cloud came over it slowed down, and when the sun came back it sped up. It talked to Teslas and several other brands through their car apps, and to many chargers through OCPP. OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) is an open standard that lets a charger take commands from outside software. That’s why so many owners never needed a solar-aware charger.

So a real Charge HQ alternative needs the same three pieces: something that reads your solar, something that decides the charge rate, and a way to control the car or charger. Each option below supplies them differently.

The quick answer: which Charge HQ alternative fits you

Start with the hardware you already have, because it rules most options in or out.

Your setup	Best fit	Follows surplus solar?	Ongoing cost (as of November 2026)
Tesla, on Amber or happy to switch	Amber for EVs	Yes, Teslas only	Amber’s $25 a month retail fee
Powerwall and Tesla Wall Connector	Tesla Smart Charging	Yes, any EV	None
Solar-aware wall charger (Zappi, Wattpilot, Evnex, etc.)	The charger’s own solar mode	Yes	None
Supported inverter, plus willingness to tinker	evcc or Home Assistant	Yes	Free, or a small sponsor fee
Tesla with a Sungrow inverter	Tessie	Yes	Tessie subscription
None of the above	Car schedule and a lower charge current	No, fixed rate only	None

Amber for EVs

Amber for EVs is the closest thing to an official successor, with two big limits. It only works if Amber is your electricity retailer, and only Teslas get the excess solar feature.

Amber is a retailer that passes on wholesale prices, which change every five minutes, for a flat $25 a month subscription (as of November 2026). Amber’s August 2026 announcement added MG, XPeng and Audi models with built-in connectivity alongside Tesla. Those cars can only be told to start or stop charging, not to speed up or slow down, so they can’t follow your spare solar the way a Tesla can.

Amber’s argument is that this matters less than it sounds. Grid-wide solar pushes wholesale prices down in the middle of the day, so charging in the cheapest windows often means charging in the sunniest hours. Your own panels still feed the car while it charges. You just lose the precise matching.

If you’re on a flat-rate plan you like, switching retailer purely for EV charging rarely makes sense. Wholesale pricing also exposes you to evening price spikes. Our Amber Electric review covers who comes out ahead.

Tesla Charge on Solar and Smart Charging

Tesla’s solar charging works well, but it needs a Powerwall. The Powerwall measures your solar surplus, and the Tesla app then sets the charge rate. Without one, the Tesla app has no way to see your solar.

The newer Smart Charging feature extends this beyond Tesla cars. According to Tesla’s Smart Charging support page, it needs:

• a Powerwall 2, Powerwall+ or Powerwall 3 on firmware 26.34 or later
• a Wall Connector Gen 3 or Universal Wall Connector on the same firmware
• the Tesla app version 4.57.5 or later
• the Powerwall set to Self-Powered mode, and only one Wall Connector on the site

Australian Wall Connectors use a Type 2 socket, so any EV sold here can plug in. Tesla’s enhanced Charge on Solar mode stays Tesla-only. If you already own a Powerwall, this is the simplest replacement, because it costs nothing extra.

Solar-aware chargers

A solar-aware charger does the whole job in the box, with no app subscription. It reads your surplus through a CT clamp or a direct link to your inverter, and adjusts its output to match. A CT clamp is a sensor that clips around your main power cable to measure how much electricity is flowing to or from the grid.

Models sold in Australia include the myenergi Zappi, Fronius Wattpilot, Evnex E2, Wallbox Pulsar Plus and several inverter-brand chargers from Sungrow, GoodWe and Sigenergy. Unit prices generally run from about $800 to $2,000 before installation (as of November 2026). Some only do solar mode when paired with the same brand of inverter, so check before you buy.

If your current charger is a basic unit, replacing it is the most expensive route. It’s also the one least likely to break when a third-party service closes. Our reviews of the Zappi, Fronius Wattpilot and Sungrow AC22E cover how each one’s solar mode behaves.

evcc and Home Assistant: the do-it-yourself route

For owners who liked Charge HQ’s flexibility, self-hosted software is the nearest match. Many former users have rebuilt their setup this way, often on a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop.

evcc is free, open-source charging software. It runs on a Raspberry Pi, a home server or Docker, and supports a long list of chargers, cars and inverters, including Fronius, Sungrow, SolarEdge, Enphase, GoodWe and Tesla. Some chargers need a sponsor token, about US$4 a month or a one-off US$150. Owners report that setup takes some patience, particularly registering a Bluetooth key with a Tesla, but that it runs unattended once configured.

Home Assistant is a home automation platform that can do the same job with more custom rules. Owners use it to charge only on surplus solar and then top up overnight in a cheap tariff window, or to juggle a home battery and two cars. For Teslas, a paid bridge like Teslemetry or a direct Bluetooth link gives Home Assistant control of the car.

Some owners go further and write their own controllers that read the inverter over Modbus, a common data protocol for inverters and meters, and command the car directly. That works, but you become your own support desk. If a car update breaks the connection, nobody else will fix it.

Tessie is a middle option for Tesla owners. It’s a paid app with a solar charging feature, but Sungrow is the only inverter it lists for it.

No smart gear: schedule the car for the middle of the day

You can get most of the benefit with no extra hardware at all. Set your car’s charging schedule to start around 10 am and stop around 3 pm, then lower the charge current in the car’s settings so it draws less than your typical surplus.

A 10 amp granny charger, the portable cable that plugs into a normal power point, draws about 2.3 kW. Five hours at that rate adds roughly 11.5 kWh, or about 75 km at a typical 15 kWh per 100 km. A 6.6 kW solar system makes about 23 to 33 kWh on an average day, based on energy.gov.au’s figure of 3.5 to 5 kWh per kW of panels. On most days there’s room for the car.

The catch is that nothing adjusts the rate. When the house runs the dishwasher or a cloud passes, the car keeps drawing and some of it comes from the grid. It’s still far cheaper than charging at night on a flat rate. Our granny charger vs wall charger guide explains when a 10 amp lead is enough.

What solar charging is worth now

Each kilowatt-hour of solar you put in the car instead of exporting is worth roughly 22 to 32 cents. That’s because feed-in tariffs have fallen so far. IPART’s 2026-27 benchmark for NSW is 3.4 to 6.5 c/kWh, down from 4.8 to 7.3 c/kWh the year before. Victoria’s Essential Services Commission no longer sets a minimum feed-in tariff, so retailers can pay as little as zero.

Grid electricity in NSW typically costs 28 to 35 c/kWh on a flat rate (as of 2026). If you drive 10,000 km a year and fill half of it from solar, that’s around 750 kWh. At 22 to 32 cents per kWh, the saving is roughly $165 to $240 a year. Charge the whole lot from solar and you double it. Our EV charging cost calculator lets you run your own tariff.

Most EV owners can make this work. About 80% of EV owners who charge at home also have rooftop solar, according to the Electric Vehicle Council’s EV Ownership Survey (2024). The Clean Energy Council puts the number of Australian homes with rooftop solar at about 4.3 million (2025).

One lesson from the closure is worth keeping. A charger or car that can fall back to its own schedule keeps working when an app disappears. Our guide to using an EV charger without an app covers which chargers still work with no cloud service at all.