Capture AI

[slicksolar]

Hi All,

Anyone else using Capture AI following Wills video with them. I've signed up since I still having issues with the fox cloud app and the octopus api.

Had my onboarding call on Wednesday and so far it's doing a hell of a better job managing when to charge than I could. They told me solar prediction are taken into account to minimise grid charging and so far seems to live up to that. I've not enabled export yet, one for the spring summer I think.

The big change for me is how the battery is lasting longer though just better management. I'm able to make it to the next cheap rate two days in a row which I haven't managed to do myself since installing a month ago.

So far fairly impressive. What has been other folks experience?

[slicksolar]

An update to my experience so far.

Very responsive support but one issue seems to be lingering.

The battery Minimum SoC seems to drop below 10% quite often despite their dashboard having been set to 20%.

Is there any long term issues with it staying below 10% for periods sometimes as long as 12hrs? They are working on finding the issue but why is the system not maintaining 10% at the very least, despite the fox app SoC and mode scheduler set to 10%?

[FoxEvoDoug]

Thanks for posting your experience, interesting to hear how others are getting on.

Capture looks great, then I watched Wil's video about Axle Energy which looks even better, so undecided!

Fox Evo
5kw inverter
10kwh battery

[slicksolar]

I've go to admit, Axel does look to have a better deal but do wonder what the payments will be post March.

I've still been finding Capture is letting the battery stay empty more than I'd like missing some charging slots, but I changed the number of battery cycles it's allowed to do per day to 2 and seen a drastic change in the scheduling. Much better use of the cheaper periods. One thing I would like though is better scheduling for when prices go to zero or below. I would've preferred it to deplete the battery more and charge when very cheap which it didn't quite do. Will ask support to look at that.

Other than that it's working better now.

[davidwf15]

what about the early battery replacement cost due to increased cycling ???

Taking the popular Fox ESS EP12 10kWh (usable) battery as a typical example costing £2500, its rated guaranteed service life is 10 years or 4000 cycles which works out at (£2500/10 =) £250 a year or (£2500/4000 cycles =) 62.5p per cycle

By doubling the cycling to twice a day using the likes of Capture AI with, say Octopus we could typically earn an extra (10kWh * 12p=) £1.20 a day which is £438 a year * 5 years = £2190 - i.e. the cost of a new battery every 5 years for no extra gain, surely it will result in negative or neutral long term benefit ?

Although batteries have and continue to improve I still feel it is detrimental to fully discharge and re-charge them more than is necessary just to gain that few extra pence.....it will be interesting to hear other peoples views...but please dont shoot me down in flames if I have got it wrong

[davidwf15]

I came across this interesting article which confirms my suspicions about repeated and deep cycling.....I dont think it's worth it for the few extra pence it will possibly make.... https://www.anernstore.com/blogs/diy-so ... epo4-myths

[slicksolar]

I should probably have clarified, the main intent was not to make money from the export from the battery, but to combine solar/batery and lower my electric bills as the primary goal, any excess is a bonus and for that I have disable the Capture AI export, as I only want to export solar when the batteries are full.

At the time I wrote my post, Capture wasn't fully utilising the cheaper times to charge up the batteries in low solar output periods, switching to 2 cycles seemed to do fix that.

It doesn't also do a fully battery discharge and charge cycle twice a day, not sure how their algorithm works, but that was the setting that fixed it for me (as in to charge when its cheapest), but as we came into spring, I was rarely seeing more than a full cycle and certainly not seeing it at the moment at all. At the solar predictive based charging has been pretty good.

While I agree multiple cycles is bad for the long term health, given how rarely, if ever, multiple cycles occur, and the point of buying the batteries was to use them, its not too bad, but everyones mileage will vary.

My bills have drastically dropped though with the whole combined setup from £138 (May 2025) to £13 (after solar only export) (May 2026), and the selective charging when good solar is predicted has helped with this.

[davidwf15]

As you rightly say, everyones' setup will be different and offer different "benefits"
I also didnt install solar to MAKE money, rather to save money and get a more reliable electric supply - we seem to get a fair few power outages and I had previously been running a couple of battery backed high power UPS's with lead acid battery replacement costs of around £300 every 3 or 4 years
We typically use around 16kWh a day / 6300kWh a year which has remained pretty constant over the 6 years I have been averaging it, with Octopus we were paying £130 - £160 a month.....since the solar and battery install in April our payment to Octopus has been just £36 (standing charge and overnight import) AND we have been credited £50 feed in tariff for May so, potentially "saving" just under £200 a month.
Obviously this will reduce over the winter months but prior to solar we recorded the usage minute by minute over 18 months using a Raspberry pi by counting the smart meter LED flashes and crunching that data against the predicted solar gains from Global Solar Atlas along with the Octopus smart EV rate of 7p per kWh over night to charge the solar battery we reckon to only be pulling from the grid for a few days over winter.
Time will tell if that is the case but in the 2 months it has been in operation the returns have exceeded our predictions
I cannot see any advantage in using capture AI as against setting the Fox app to force charge the battery overnight, I still feel the extra "savings" of a few pence a day by cycling the battery harder and more often would not outweigh the cost of early battery replacement.........but I could be wrong

[slicksolar]

Perhaps their algorithm has improved, im certainly not seeing much cycling (225 full cycles since End of oct 25 to today), but wow the savings have been great. BUT, we've had the system from October. I did try manually managing it, but I constantly forgot to adjust for that days solar input into the battery. In the depth of winter we definitely didn't get anywhere near enough sunlight to top up the batteries, daily needing the grid.

I then switched to Octopus Agile tariff and did try using the fox integration to manage charging times but it wasn't taking predicted solar into account at the time and solely used the cheapest selected number of blocks to charge up, and that really is the main reason I joined Capture. I didn't want to buy power when solar can charge it from free and this they seem to have got almost spot on.

My biggest regret is not enough battery. 2 x EP6 batteries only just covers our usage, and third would be comfortable. Too late to move to 2x EP12 . I didn't appreciate the way the Fox system handles voltages means you can't mix and match EP6 and EP12s.

Out of curiosity, did you get a changeover for the power cuts, if so what solution was it. I ended with manual changeover, but not sure if that was the best idea. Wasn't enough space for the automatic changeover and double the price. But like yourself, got smaller UPS for critical stuff, enough time to run and flip the switch if im home.

[aaronlukemarshall]

I signed up AXEL after much deliberation, I found that the my current EV rate with British Gas is 4.4pkWh from midnight to 5am and my cycles were easier to manage my own battery than Capture AI could offer, either force charge or don’t with that tariff so I did some research and found that AXEL provided the best in terms of sign up return £25 and a few extra pounds each month, based on its current given return, also I could l support the grid when with my VPP and because I enjoy the sense of being part of the grid solution not problem and having the flexibility to manage my own energy. I also found that a steady export tariff was actually more beneficial in the longer run when you have both import/export of British Gas with export being 15pkWh. And the two Tarrifs on a longer haul beat Octopus in a few ways. Plus the peak save deals on the weekends and some odd weekdays actually worked out better in my bills without the faff of an AI that does simple calculation/management function, that will eventually charge you later on.