At a glance
The Flip Gateway is a small device installed in the home that talks to the battery's inverter directly, instead of going through the manufacturer's cloud. It gives Flip local, reliable control of every battery it deploys, and it is standard on Flip's own installations.
- What it is
- A Flip-designed gateway connected to the inverter in each home
- What it replaces
- Dependence on each manufacturer's cloud for control and data
- Where it runs
- Standard on Flip's own deployments
The challenge
Most home batteries are controlled through the manufacturer's cloud. A dispatch travels from the utility to the aggregator, to the manufacturer's servers, and finally down to the device. Every hop is a chance for something to go wrong.
- Outside Flip's control. Cloud outages, rate limits, API changes and slow command delivery all sit with the manufacturer.
- Incomplete data. Manufacturer clouds often report telemetry late, at coarse intervals, or with gaps, which makes performance hard to measure and prove.
- Settings drift. Installer or manufacturer settings can quietly limit how much a battery delivers, and they are hard to see or correct remotely.
For programs where Flip owns the battery and guarantees capacity to a utility, those risks are unacceptable.
What Flip did
Direct, local control. The gateway speaks to the inverter directly over its native interface, so commands reach the battery without passing through a manufacturer's cloud.
Fine-grained telemetry. The gateway reads the inverter at short intervals and streams the data to Flip, giving Flip a detailed view of every battery so it can spot and correct problems proactively, before they affect an event.
Configuration Flip controls. Flip pushes each gateway the configuration for its inverter model and checks it against what's running on the device, correcting drift before it costs capacity.
Secure fleet management. Every gateway is individually authenticated and managed remotely, with secure over-the-air software updates across the fleet.
Outcomes
Through a manufacturer's cloud API, dispatches deliver 70–75% of the battery's potential energy. Through the Flip Gateway, performance rises to 97.5%.
Why it matters for utilities and partners
When Flip guarantees capacity to a utility, it can't depend on a chain of third-party clouds, each with its own bugs and outages, to deliver it. The gateway puts control and measurement in Flip's hands, at the home, which is what makes long-term capacity commitments credible.
For partners, it means the batteries Flip deploys behave predictably, report accurately, and keep performing year after year.