My priorities

Perhaps the most important lesson from the whole project: decide your priorities before you wade through offers. Otherwise you optimise for price, because it's the easiest to compare — and miss what actually matters to you.

My order

1. Full local control. Home Assistant/evcc, Modbus, no cloud dependency — for PV and heat pump. This was the north star.
2. Low winter costs. Cushion the expensive, PV-poor winter via dynamic tariff + battery arbitrage.
3. Automatic 3-phase whole-house backup. In an outage the house should keep running seamlessly.
4. Serious, long-term service. Who's still reachable in year 8?
5. Complete scope. No hidden add-ons (meter cabinet, backup, tiles).
6. Value for money. Important — but deliberately last, not first.

Why local control came first

Because it unlocks everything else: without open interfaces, no own tariff logic, no cross-vendor coupling of PV and heat pump, no protection from cloud subscriptions and outages. The platform choice (inverter and heat-pump brand) thus became the hardest criterion — harder than price.

How a priority list carries the decision

With a clear order, compromises become rational: if offer A is a few hundred euros cheaper but hampers local control, it loses — because criterion 1 outranks criterion 6. Without this list, price would have dominated unconsciously.

Your list may differ — and that's fine

Maybe for you maximum saving or minimum effort comes first. Entirely legitimate. The point isn't my order but that you have one before you compare. Write it down before the first glossy offer skews your view.

In short: priorities first, then compare. For me local control came first because it enables everything else — so the platform mattered more than price. Your order may differ; what matters is setting it deliberately.

To close, the most honest page of the project: my mistakes and corrections.