No. The hub has no relay, no contactor and no output of any kind. It measures what your circuits are doing, prices it against your tariff, stores the history and hands the numbers to whatever you integrate it with. That's the whole job.
This is a deliberate line, not a missing feature. Measurement and switching have different failure modes: a meter that goes quiet costs you data, while a controller that goes wrong costs you a frozen house or a cold cylinder.
So how do people automate on it?
In their own system. The hub publishes every point's power and energy over MQTT, and Home Assistant picks them up as entities; you then write the automation there, acting on your own devices.
Two things worth knowing if you go that way:
- The tariff zone isn't an entity. Discovery covers the measurements, not the tariff. The current zone is in the hub's telemetry frame, and one MQTT sensor makes it available — which is what lets you trigger on "the night zone started".
- Make "no data" the safe state. If the hub goes quiet, the sensor should become unavailable and the automation should do nothing, leaving the appliance on its own schedule. Never write one that depends on the hub coming back.
And when you do act on a heating or cooling load, act through its own interface — the setpoint, a preset, a mode — rather than cutting its supply. Compressors need their own cycling and defrost runs, and many simply won't tolerate being switched off from outside.
What about the chargers and heat pumps in the guides?
Measured, not driven. When a guide shows an EV charger or a heat pump, RBgrid is reporting what that circuit does — its power, its energy, its cost by zone. Any decision in those articles happens in Home Assistant, on equipment you already control.