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

During a severe weather event, please always follow the advice on how to manage your system given by your electricity network/distributor first. 

For Battery Owners

During a power outage or black-out situation, your battery will automatically enter backup 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 it has entered the backup mode as it is then also isolated from the grid. 

Should there be any issues with the backup mode of the battery, we recommend reaching out to your installer or battery manufacturer to check on the battery settings to ensure the backup 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 backup 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 that 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., the Tesla app or the iSolar cloud) and change the settings directly in the system.

You can access the manual control options by:
1. Heading to the "Devices" tab of your Amber app
2. Selecting "Plan"
3. Scrolling down and selecting "Control my Battery"

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 the 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 were 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 the Sungrow reboot procedure (video here)
• Turn on optimisations again when the grid electricity outage is over.

For Electric Vehicle (EV) Owners 

To ensure your EV has sufficient charge before a potential outage, we recommend the following:

• Charge to 100% – Aim to fully charge your EV in advance. Check your EV's companion app (e.g., Tesla app) and remove any charge limits that might prevent the vehicle from reaching 100% charged.
• Adjust A4EV Charging Settings – Update your Charge Level and Schedule settings in A4EV Charging Modes to avoid relying on a future charging session that may not happen if an outage occurs.
• Start Charging Immediately – If price isn’t a concern through the outage, use the "Immediately start charging" option and set the "Charge until" field to a time far in the future to ensure uninterrupted charging.

For customers with both a Battery & EV

If you have both a home battery and an EV, consider enabling the "Minimise charging from home battery" toggle in the "Home Battery Management" setting of Amber for EVs. This will help prioritise conserving your home battery’s charge rather than discharging it into your EV during an outage.