This will help explain the SmartShift™ battery automation discharge limits to help you get an idea of the battery energy we will allow SmartShift™ to access.
Firstly, the Amber battery automation will always respect your chosen minimum reserve level (also referred to as back-up reserve). 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. This is so you can keep as much energy in your battery as you feel comfortable with for outage situations.
Amber however also has another action limit in place. The SmartShift™ battery automation won’t automatically discharge the battery to the grid if the battery energy is below 25%. This is an API limit that has been set across the fleet.
Nonetheless, you can still manually discharge the remaining 5% down to 20% via the manual control buttons in the Amber app. Discharging at high power when the state of charge of the battery is low is in general not great for battery health which is one of the reasons why we are limiting the API control below 20%. Some battery manufacturers (e.g. Tesla) also enforce this API threshold for external controls so we cannot control the system below 20% which is why we've applied this as a rule for the whole fleet.
Below 20% you can still self-consume the remaining battery energy down to the selected minimum reserve level. That means if your minimum reserve level is 5%, any energy below 20% down to 5% can be used to cover your household usage.
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.
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