Can I charge from my excess solar with Amber for EVs?

At Amber we know that most EV owners have solar and love charging from their solar if they can. Amber offers two types of solar charging for EVs: predictive solar charging and connected excess solar charging.

Connected Solar Charging

When this applies to you:

• You have a system that is enrolled in Amber's SmartShift™ automation.
• Your enrolled system reports solar production and household consumption.

Overview of supported systems:

• SolarEdge inverters
• Fronius solar inverters (full compatibility list available here)
• Sungrow systems (full compatibility list available here)
• Redback solar inverters
• Tesla, Sigenergy and AlphaESS batteries that report solar and household consumption

Click here for a full list of Amber for Batteries supported systems

How it works: Amber reads solar data directly from your inverter, your EV and your consumption meter. The measurement of all three devices provides information to precisely calculate the available excess solar to be used for EV charging.

Additional benefits:

• If your solar inverter is eligible for solar curtailment, curtailment is automatically disabled during excess solar charging to allow your EV to use excess solar instead of your solar generation getting dialled down or turned off.
• You can set a feed-in tariff threshold. When the feed-in tariff rises above your chosen threshold, EV charging stops and excess solar is sold to the grid instead.

Setup process:

1. Navigate to the Devices tab in the Amber app
2. Select Enrol Solar and/or Battery
3. Choose your solar inverter brand and submit details like serial number
4. Amber will link to your inverter and begin reading solar data directly
5. Turn on ‘Excess Solar’ in the EV settings

Note - If you previously used predictive solar charging and later enrolled a compatible inverter, contact Amber to switch to connected solar charging.

Predictive Solar Charging

When this applies to you: You don't have a compatible solar inverter that Amber can connect to directly (you cannot enrol it with Amber for Batteries).

How it works: Amber uses your solar system specifications combined with weather data from AEMO to predict your solar generation throughout the day. While not as precise as connected charging, this still enables useful solar charging functionality.

Predictive solar will not account for any non-connected home battery. If you have a home battery not enrolled with Amber for Batteries, you may experience your EV getting preference to charge from your solar over your home battery.

Setup process:

1. Go to your Charge Controls page
2. Find the Predictive Solar Charging control
3. Tap "Tell us about your solar system"
4. Provide estimates for:
   • Typical peak solar generation on a sunny day
   • Typical household consumption during solar production hours
     
     

Finding your typical solar generation:

• Check your solar monitoring app for production curves on sunny days
• Contact your solar installer for information
• Read values from your inverter's LCD screen if available
• Use your inverter's nameplate power rating

Important note: Predictions aren't perfect, so some grid energy may still be used for charging. The system makes useful assumptions based on available data but cannot match the accuracy of real-time inverter data.