How does the Amber battery automation affect my supply during a power outage?

During a power outage or black-out situation, your battery will automatically enter the back-up mode. In general the Amber battery automation should not prevent your battery from entering this emergency mode. Amber will also not be able to send control commands to the system once its entered the back-up mode as it is then also isolated from the grid.

Should there be any issues with the back-up mode of the battery, we recommend reaching out to your installer or battery manufacturer to check on the battery settings to ensure the back-up reserve mode during an outage is operating properly.

This said, there may be some adverse effects of having the SmartShift™ battery automation enabled before an outage. Because SmartShift™ doesn't know about the outage it may plan to discharge the battery earlier in the day during high prices and leave the battery relatively empty. This is why, we've compiled a few strategies to counteract this:

1. If you expect an outage you can use the SmartShift™ manual controls to charge up your battery to full beforehand and then disable the SmartShift™ automation via your app.
2. At any time you can disable SmartShift™ to avoid any interference with the battery. SmartShift™ will not interfere when the battery is in back-up mode during an outage.
3. You can increase your SmartShift™ minimum reserve level. SmartShift™ will not direct your battery to discharge energy below this level. Please note SmartShift™ will never automatically direct discharges to the grid below 25%. This is a fleetwide limit we've set to protect battery health and avoid draining the battery. If you'd prefer this level to be higher, you can make this change in the SmartShift™ settings.
4. Increase your battery reserve level. To increase the internal battery reserve level, please head to your device app (e.g. Tesla app or isolar cloud) and change the setting directly with the system.

I hope this helps with some strategies during storm season and to explain how SmartShift™ works during an outage and how you can use the technology to your advantage. The product team is also working on developing a storm mode feature to be integrated with the SmartShift™ automation but we don't yet have a timeline for the release here.

NOTE FOR SUNGROW HYBRID SOLAR SYSTEM OWNERS IN THE EVENT OF AN OUTAGE:

For Sungrow hybrid solar systems configured for on/off curtailment, we send a command to the solar and battery system to temporarily shut down when the cost to draw from grid is lower than the cost to export their solar (i.e. the FiT is negative).

However, if a grid outage occurs when the Feed-in Tariff is negative, and the last command received by the system was to shut down, then the system doesn’t know that there’s an outage and will not shift into backup mode.

In order to solve this:

• If/when an outage occurs, disable SmartShift Automation in the Amber App (Devices tab - Settings)
• Follow Sungrow reboot procedure (video here)
• Turn on optimisations again when the grid electricity outage is over.