How much of my battery energy can Amber access?

Franzi from Amber

Updated October 13, 2025 05:16

SmartShift will never directly tell your battery to discharge to below 25%
Minimum reserve level ≠ battery discharge threshold
The minimum reserve level (or back-up reserve level) set directly in your battery manufacturers app, will always take priority

How does the minimum reserve level (MRL) impact SmartShift?

There are two concepts to help understand how much of your battery energy SmartShift will be able to access:

Automation discharge threshold: As a blanket rule, SmartShift won't discharge your battery to the grid if the battery energy is below 25%. This is an API limit that has been set across all batteries. If your minimum reserve level (as described below) is greater than 25%, then SmartShift won't discharge your battery to the grid below the minimum reserve level.
Minimum reserve level (also referred to as back-up reserve): The Amber battery automation will always respect your chosen minimum reserve level. You can set this level in your battery app (e.g. Tesla or AlphaESS). For example, if the minimum reserve level is set to 30% with AlphaESS, Amber also won’t discharge the battery below that reserve level reported to us from the battery inverter.

Some other things to be aware of:

You can still manually discharge your battery below SmartShift's 25% limit if your minimum reserve level is below 25%. For example, if your minimum reserve level is 20%, you can manually discharge the remaining 5% down to 20% via the manual controls button in the Amber app.
If your minimum reserve level is below 25%, you will still be able to self-consume the remaining battery energy down to the selected minimum reserve level. For example, if your minimum reserve level is 5%, any energy below 25% down to 5% can be used to cover your household usage. The remaining 5% will be saved for an outage situation.
Generally, your battery manufacturer will treat your minimum reserve level as the battery energy level that will be reserved for outage situations. This is so you can keep as much energy in your battery as you feel comfortable with for these situations. This also means that once your battery reaches this energy level you will import energy from the grid to cover household needs.
Discharging at high power when the state of charge of the battery is low is in general not great for battery health. This is one of the reasons why we don't let SmartShift automatically discharge your battery if the energy is below 25%. Some battery manufacturers (e.g. Tesla) also enforce an API threshold of 20% for external controls so we cannot control the system below 20%.

For more info of how the Amber SmartShift automation interacts with your system and energy supply during a power outage head to this article here.

To view or update what SmartShift thinks your minimum reserve level is, visit the SmartShift settings screen from within the ‘Devices’ tab of the mobile app and scroll down to ‘Enter Minimum Reserve Level’.
We recommend making sure the Minimum Reserve Level within the Amber app matches your manufacturer’s app.
Using the 'Enter Minimum Reserve Level’ feature in the Amber app, IS NOT telling SmartShift how much of your battery can be used for SmartShift automation. SmartShift will always attempt to use 75% of your total battery capacity (as SmartShift has a blanket rule that prevents it from discharging any battery to below 25%).
The battery hardware is the main mechanism responsible for following the minimum reserve target, and making sure SmartShift is aware of this leads to better battery decisions. If there is a large difference between the two, this can cause some unintended consequences (such as sporadic charging from the grid).