This paper proposes an energy management strategy for a residential microgrid comprising photovoltaic (PV) panels, a small wind turbine and solar thermal collectors. The microgrid can control the power exchanged with the grid thanks to a battery and a controllable electric water heater, which provide two degrees of freedom to the control strategy. As input data, the proposed control strategy uses the battery state of charge (SOC), the temperature of the hot water tank, the power of each microgrid element as well as the demand and renewable generation forecasts. By using forecasted data and by controlling the electric water heater, the strategy is able to achieve a better grid power profile while using a smaller battery than previous works, hence reducing the overall cost of the system. The strategy is tested by means of simulation with real data for one year and it is also experimentally validated in the microgrid built at the Renewable Energy Laboratory at the UPNA. The authors would like to acknowledge that this work has been partially funded under grants PID2019-110816RB-C21 and PID2019–111262RB–I00 by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033). And also by VLIR-UOS and the Belgian Development Cooperation (DGD) under the project EC2020SIN322A101 (2020-EXT-007).