I just bought a home battery to help
Lower the cost of my bill, also have it as a backup for devices (like for example my freezer and NAS) to not die on me when the power trips (I have an old house)
I also have a dynamic power contract, meaning the pricing is different every 15 minutes. The pricing, per 15 miniues, is presented a day ahead, at 13:00'ish o'clock. So the battery charges when the price is low and provides the kWh back to the house when prices are high (almost 0,90 euro per kWh, during peak hour today! Loaded up at 0,20 euro earlier in the day)
Working peachy.
But the I noticed my power draw profile from the grid changes due to this. There is 0 usage during most of the day, and big peaks during the cheapest period. The battery all manages that itself, as it has access to the power pricing.
My usage used to give away when I was home, when I was on holiday etc... but now each day is sort of the same, with or without us being present.
It is something I did not consider before buying, but what I now see as an extra bonus :-)
Cool. I hadn't thought of that benefit.
Honestly, I never would’ve thought of that. The privacy benefit is actually pretty clever.
The technique has a name in the research: battery-based load hiding. Studies consistently find that a battery hides appliance signatures well (the meter loses track of your kettle) but not whether anyone is home. It can't flatten the mean and variance of your demand, and that is what a simple occupancy detector keys on. Two weeks at lower total consumption still reads as "away", because cooking, laundry, hot water and EV charging all drop to zero and the battery does nothing about that.
Also worth knowing: a battery run for price arbitrage leaks more than one run to mask load. Different objectives. Real privacy means trading away some arbitrage margin for a noisier grid profile.
And the data did not disappear, it moved. Your controller now logs minute-level consumption, and for most brands that is a cloud service. The exposure shifted from the grid operator to the battery vendor.