Our smart energy app pairs with your home battery and EV to make managing it all effortless. That means maximising your home battery for your home’s energy needs, selling energy to the grid for maximum profit (yours, not ours) and directing more of your solar into your EV for free, green kilometres.
We are not yet at the point where we offer holistic smart management of both your EV charging and battery but we are working towards this.
That said, if you have a compatible battery you can take advantage of both Amber for EVs and the SmartShift™ battery automation. After collecting feedback from our Amber for Batteries and EVs beta testers we've released the following battery coordination features and will expand on the smart management in coming months.
1. Don’t charge my EV from my battery!
Without a way of stopping it, EV charging will drain your home battery. So, we built a way of stopping it. Now you have the choice to preserve your battery energy when your EV is charging.
You can find this setting in Your Charging Controls. At the bottom of the page you can activate a toggle which means we won’t use your home battery energy to charge your EV.
We’re still early days in optimising the EV and home battery relationship. When the battery coordination feature is toggled on and your EV wants to charge, we’ll automatically put your battery into Preserve Charge to avoid it draining to charge the EV. This protects your home battery’s energy for when you want to use it power your home or export to the grid.
This will be reflected in the Amber for Batteries experience on the ‘Devices’ tab where you’ll see a Preserve command that looks a little bit different to normal.
Should you wish to stop your EV charging and resume normal automation or manual control of your battery, you can toggle off the EV automation and battery coordination.
In a scenario when there’s a price spike and it’s lucrative to send your battery energy to the grid your EV charging should automatically stop (based on your configured Charging Rules). It may take a minute or two to stop charging.
We say “minimise” as there are times when a small amount of battery energy may be sent to your EV, typically only for a short period of time while its sending commands between the two.
2. I want to choose where my solar goes.
You can now choose whether your EV or your battery charges first, and when to switch over.
Disable solar curtailment: To avoid impacts of negative FiT, most Amber for Batteries customers have a solar curtailment feature, which will reduce solar production. However, soaking up excess solar while FiTs are below zero is an even better way to maximise your self-generated solar value.
We've therefore also released a feature to ensure we deactivate Automated Solar Curtailment at those times where you want to soak up that excess solar through your EV charging instead.
Excess solar charging: We also offer an excess solar feature that will be able to ensure your EV is charged whenever you have excess solar. Charging will stop when excess appears. This allows you to get more value from your solar, given that it is almost always worth more to you than it is to sell it to the grid. If your solar inverter is already enrolled to Amber for Batteries, you can take advantage of connected excess solar charging. You can read more about this feature here.
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