For years now, Catch Power has offered what I think is the go-to consumption meter for single-phase houses. Now that the six-channel unit has arrived, your three-phase house can enjoy the same benefits. Electricity bills might be growing, but thankfully, Catch Power is adding features to its Catch Control faster than retailers can add zeroes to your bill.
I recently quizzed industry legend Nigel Morris about the new six-channel unit, and I’d like to say that we’ll offer a deep analysis of all of its abilities, but to be honest, not even the head of sales and marketing at Catch Power is completely across all of what this thing does. It sounds ludicrous, but as Nigel himself puts it, the questions don’t seem to matter; the boffins out the back keep telling him, “Yeah, we can do that”.
Impatient? Scroll to the end to see a list of everything the Catch can do.
It reminds me of the first round of home electrification when everybody knew electricity was better than lamp oil, and they had no idea how many useful things would be plugged into the walls 100 years later.
What Is Catch Control?
Catch Control is a hardware and software solution for managing solar energy, batteries, and loads. Available in 2-channel and 6-channel versions, Catch Control works with single, split, or three-phase properties and is compatible with most popular inverters.
As a company, Catch Power started out with the Green Catch, a diverter designed for simple resistive loads (like electric hot water services) to harvest solar yield dynamically. As the sun varies, so too does the storage of energy in your hot water service.
Catch Control is a consumption meter that can stand alone or be integrated into your solar power system. It uses RS-485 to communicate with your inverter, so it’ll replace proprietary units like the Fronius Smart Meter.
Unlike any other, Catch Control has a relay output to divert solar energy. The ON/OFF switching isn’t as refined as dynamic control, but you can connect it to many things, notably those with a motor (like a pump or air conditioner) that would be damaged by a Green Catch.
Controlling So Much More
Catch is more than just an energy meter—it’s designed to give you monitoring, analysis, alarms, remote control and automation, network compliance, and the ability to connect a brand salad of different devices and equipment.
Its narrow, using only 2 poles in your switchboard, making it straightforward to install. Multiple units can be combined for more complex setups.
It also supports Wi-Fi, Modbus RTU, and Bluetooth communications for maximum flexibility. Plus, the 6 unit features “dry contact” terminals for managing additional loads with Demand Response Mode inputs.
DRM means you can throttle your air conditioner, for instance, and reduce costs by either being paid for participating in a demand reduction scheme or just cutting consumption to keep below a demand charge threshold.
Solar and Battery Optimisation
At its core, Catch Control is designed to increase your self-consumption of solar power. If you have a retail deal from the likes of Amber, here’s how it handles scenarios you’ll encounter using live spot pricing:
- High Feed-in Tariff (FiT): If the FiT is attractive, Catch Control will turn off non-essential loads and discharge the batteries, maximizing your export profits.
- Negative FiT: If the feed-in tariff goes negative (i.e., the dreaded sun tax where you’re paying to export), it will curtail your inverters, preventing you from losing money by exporting energy.
- Negative Consumption Tariff: If import electricity prices drop into negative territory (i.e., you’ll be paid to consume grid electricity), Catch Control shuts off the inverter, turns appliances on, and charges your battery to take advantage of the earnings available.
Battery Exclusion Zones: Prevent Your EV Draining The House Battery
Catch Control’s battery exclusion zones give you precise control over where your stored energy goes.
It’s the kind of seamless integration you’d come to expect from having everything under the same brand ecosystem. And it’s the reason we often recommend brand loyalty. If you have, say, Fronius Solarweb overseeing a Gen24 hybrid inverter, then using a Wattpilot EV charger and Ohmpilot hot water diverter is the best choice.
While Tesla, Sigenergy, Solar Edge and GoodWe can do similar things, Catch Control means that even though SMA & Sungrow don’t offer EV chargers, you’ll be able to integrate them with other brands.
Using Catch Control on the main switchboard saved thousands in trenching & cables to outbuildings here.
A Real Advantage
For example, your EV charger can easily drain your house battery because it can’t tell the difference between raw sunshine and stored electricity. We’ve detailed a workaround before, but with Catch Control, you can set exclusion zones to stop your EV charger from drawing power when it shouldn’t, ensuring you maximise the financial & practical benefits of your house battery.
It’s all about priorities. Fill the house battery first because it will save you money during the evening peak, or even export it for a higher FiT. Then, fill the car with excess solar energy if it’s available, while bearing in mind that low-priced grid energy could be available on a scheduled midday or overnight tariff.
All Your Energy Data in One Place
Ordinarily, preventing a home battery powering an EV charger meant connecting it to the grid, outside the solar & battery system. Without secondary apps, you would lose visibility of that load. Catch Control gives you full oversight and even retains the ability to charge an EV during an outage.1
An Example: Hot Water Control and Amber Pricing
Catch Control works seamlessly with Amber’s real-time pricing to help you run your hot water system when energy is cheapest. Under normal conditions, it will use your surplus solar energy. However, during price spikes, Catch Control automatically adjusts, ensuring you avoid paying a premium for electricity.
One user asked if Catch Control could still heat their water if Amber throttles their Sungrow inverter due to negative feed-in tariffs. The answer is yes—Catch Control can prioritise your hot water, ensuring you can harvest solar yield even when Amber curtails solar exports.
Circled in red is the live notification of DNSP flexible export control
Features of Catch Control
Although it’s packed with features, this is an incomplete list because functions and brand integrations are being added all the time:
- Inverter, battery, and load control: Manage all your major energy resources in one place.
- Static, dynamic, and flexible control: Adjust settings as your energy needs change throughout the day.
- Grid Connection Compliance: Approved solution for flexible export, demand response and emergency backstop rules.
- Live Notification of Network Intervention: This is a real-time indicator for network curtailment events.
- Live data and historical data storage: See how your system is performing in real-time or review past performance.
- Solar performance analysis: Get insights into how efficiently your solar panels are operating with Solar Analytics.
- Advanced battery calculator: Predict savings and performance before investing in batteries.
- Load scheduling and timers: Automate when appliances run to optimise for low energy costs.
- EV charger control: Manage your electric vehicle charging based on solar availability and tariffs.
- Amber wholesale integration: Catch integrates seamlessly with Amber to manage energy based on real-time pricing.
- Fleet management: Ideal for homes with multiple energy systems or commercial setups.
- Remote Control: Manage your system remotely with the ability to manually switch connected loads on or off.
- Cloud tethering of meters and inverters: If you have a rural or commercial property, Two Catch Control devices can offer export limiting over long distances without having to bury hundreds of metres of cable.
Universal Energy Management for Your Home
Catch Control integrates with your solar setup, offering universal energy metering, export limiting, and dynamic export compliance across Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and soon NSW.
With Solar Analytics’ ability to search for better tariffs and predict savings from adding batteries, Catch Control can also optimise household energy efficiency and costs.
Whether you’re looking to reduce energy bills, boost your solar self-consumption, or prepare your home for future energy markets, Catch Control offers the flexibility to help you get there. It’s so good I think SolarQuotes might even buy one and we’ll install it to show you.
Footnotes
- Charging an EV during a blackout would likely be very slow. It’s an edge case but after seeing recent natural disasters in the US it may be worth confirming this function ↩
About Anthony Bennett
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My older Fronius Symo three-phase gives me a 12V signal once a set production figure is reached, like 2,400W of the H/W system and using a SSR relay I can switch on the H/W system.
Fronius is selling a unit, which works on surplus and not production, but that unit is $500 plus installation and like the above mentioned unit, it becomes a cost/benefit analysis to see if it is worthwhile.
Hi Dominic,
The Fronius will as you say operate a relay, I’ve done that myself. Or if you use the Ohmpilot hot water controller, it will follow the solar yield dynamically. This is probably more useful if you have a smaller solar PV system with less “excess” to harvest but the controller will only handle 3kW so using a conventional 3.6kW element isn’t possible.
Three phase catch power looks good, is it permitted in WA?
I didn’t see a mention normally that means unlikely.
What is the App like to use have you done any testing?
Hi Kel,
No reason I’m aware of that WA won’t allow a piece of monitoring hardware.
We’ll be doing an install and some more testing ourselves after AllEnergy (solar xmess is this week in Melbourne)
If it’s only two poles wide, how is it measuring 3-phase voltages?
Hi Alex,
There’s 6 CT coils so you can clip them around 6 different wires. ie 3 phases of consumption & 3 phases of solar, or on a single phase site separate loads can be measured.
CT’s only measure current, not voltage.
Yes Alex.
And like Solar analytics, Wattwatchers & various other “smart meter” products they have separate terminals to sample site voltage. Care needs to be taken to make sure the phases on the voltage reference match the CT coil placement.
Cheers
OK thanks. I’m just amazed a unit only 2 DIN slots wide has enough space for nine input terminals plus ground. It would help if Catch actually published some information on their website.
TBF Catch’s website is an absolute shocker. They appear to be electrical engineer led – which is usually great for the product and terrible for the website LOL
Perhaps this t-shirt logo might add some further insight into Finn’s comment ? 🙂
https://i.etsystatic.com/21540718/r/il/0421d5/4110926197/il_1588xN.4110926197_3cb7.jpg
PS.
Thank you Anthony for an easy to understand article (albeit, only up to a point, for numbat like me) …. but still wondering if/how Catch could be useful for my situation: (soon to be) all-electric single-phase household (when heat pump HWS is installed next week), 6.6Kw solar PV, Tesla Powerwall 2, and EV (about to install 7Kw wall charger). Just not sure the 6.6Kw PV system will provide sufficient excess power to warrant a Catch. Or is this a case of size doesn’t matter ?
Just wondering … Does this interface with a single phase Powerwall 3 setup allowing Amber type control and curtailing to maximise savings?
I think Amber would have direct integration with Powerwall.
PW3 also has a dry contact for switching a hot water service or the like.
Sounds great, I’ll definitely look forward to hearing more about this.
We all need to get smarter about how we use power, and the more automation we can use, the better. I currently do everything including car charging “manually”, so this really sounds promising.
I am in the process of finally ‘biting the bullet’s to get solar. When I first started investigations years ago, I was going to get as big a system as would fit on my roof, and make some money with feed in tariffs. Now that ship has sailed. So I thought of getting a small system to cover my consumption and was going to get a catch power green to use my hot water service as a ‘battery’ of sorts. Then I looked at Amber again and thought that since I’m semi-retired and have available time to manage a system – I thought I’d opt rather for the ‘catchpower relay’ (now known as the catch control), then lo and behold – catch power released the six channel controller. Looking into its greater number of controlled devices ( including my compatible inverter aircon) I’ve decided to go for the 6 channel. I’m also going to participate in wholesale electricity via catchpower’s software and offset the cost of the 13 kW solar and 19kWh battery. With the sungrow 10kW inverter it will also automatically go into ‘off-grid’ mode, charging the battery and powering self consumption devices when the grid goes down. With the decommissioning of coal fired power plants, and the increased consumption needs – I think that blackouts/brownouts are more likely. I like having access to my comforts. Catchpower’s acquisition of Solar Analytics and it’s inclusion in the purchase price of the controller will assist greatly in maintaining hands-on control of my system, or offloading that task to catchpower. Yes, it’s expensive to set up – but what price is peace of mind? If my guesstimations pan out, I should be able to recoup the cost in around 7 years. Beyond that, it’s all gravy.
Hi there Solarquotes, I have a 6.6 kw system, a Goodwe GW5048D-ES inverter and 2 x 3.5 kw batteries (which can be charged from the grid).
In a lengthy power failure or without power at all, could the batteries be charged from a battery charger powered by a small generator ? If so, what type of charger would I need and would connecting the charger to the battery side of the isolating switch surfice, possibly with an Anderson style connector.
Regards,
Allan Wells.
Hi Allan,
I’m sure the GoodWe units are a managed battery with a comms cable back to the inverter and these will not be happy about being unplugged and fed from a separate source.
You could parallel a forklift battery charger perhaps, but I’d assume without very careful management it’s likely to either not work; or burst into flames.
I have seen DC coupled solar added to managed batteries but it was a dedicated off grid system powered with a Selectronic SpPro and Victron MPPT with just a couple panels to ensure black start capability.
If you want extended autonomy, to treat the grid with contempt, you need a proper solution that’s designed for it, preferably with PowerPlus unmanaged batteries.
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/selectronic-sp-pro/
Thanks Anthony,
With my current 7 kwh battery set up, depending on the weather, the battery will last anywhere from 3:00am to 8:00am the following day. I guess not too much extra storage capacity would surfice and hopefully enough FIT would cover the supply charge.
Cheers,
Allan Wells.
Can you privide a high level comparison against the similar(ish?) offering from Paladin?
Hi Anthony, many thanks for your excellent articles. I have a 13 kw array with Enphase micro inverters and a Tesla Powerwall 2 on single phase in Sydney. My electricity plan is a fixed tariff with my hot water on controlled load.I would like to switch to a TOU electricity plan with the hot water being heated by solar during the day – and from grid during off peak at night to top up.Is it possible (or the best solution) to use the Catch Control to set the consumption priority as house load before battery before hot water before feed to grid? And is it possible to set up timed powering of the hot water system from grid to synchronise with the off peak time band using the Catch control – or would I need a separate timer?
Solar analytics isn’t as feature rich when you have micro-inverters
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/six-channel-catch-control-mb3007/
Hi there Peter,
A bit over two years ago, I had our off peak hot water system replaced. Unbeknown to me at the time, the electrition removed the off peak meter and connected the water heater to the main meter.
About a year later (twelve months or so ago), I added a battery to the solar system. It was then that I found out about the missing meter.
The battery installer installed a timer switch so that the water heater comes on in the late morning for a few hours, now, the thermostat in the heater turns off after two to two and a half hours. Much better than off peak.
Cheers,
Allan Wells.
Hi Allan,
Thanks for your reply. I guess I was wondering if I could have some smarts built in so that the hot water would only be heated during the day by excess solar that would otherwise have gone to the grid. I’m sure most of the time (for me) a timer set from 12:00 to 14:00 would effectively be doing just that – but I was concerned that during prolonged rainy spells (particularly in winter) that I would be paying shoulder or peak rates for the power during that period (shoulder being double controlled load rates and a third higher than TOU off-peak rates). Not a major issue probably in the big picture but wondering if Catch Control could help in this regard (considering I also have a battery).
Cheers,
Peter
Hi there Peter,
During prolonged rainy spells (particularly in winter), there may not be enough excess energy (alone) to heat your water. The grid energy that you do use will only be what the solar can not provide.
Your water heater is like a battery (it stores energy), the less hot water you use and the longer you can keep the hot water in the tank hot, the less energy you use to keep it hot. I have a furniture removalists blanket (double thickness) wrapped around and (thicker) on top of my 250 ltr storage tank. I have seen bubble wrap used instead of a blanket (could be better)?
I doubt that I pay for any grid power to heat my hot water, as just prior to the switch cutting in to turn the heater on, the water is still scaulding hot.
I am situated in Northern NSW with three adults in the house.
Cheers,
Allan Wells.