Amber Electric
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Fantastic if you understand the product, but not for everyone
I have a decent sized solar array and a 16kwh battery, for a household of 2 people. This generates a lot more power than we need, so I looked at amber as a way to leverage our excess battery. If you do not have solar and a battery, then it is very unlikely that Amber is the right energy company for you. Firstly because it will likely not work well for you, and secondly because if you are not someone interested in understanding and making the most of the way the market operates, then you will probably end up with some surprise massive bills by using power when it is expensive, rather than getting big rebates by selling from your battery at these times. We signed up in November last year - There was a bumpy initial 3-4 months as there were some issues getting our inverter to communicate properly with the app (Our inverter brand was only recently supported, and it appears there were some teething issues not worked out yet). This does mean we missed the most lucritive few months over last summer and lost a lot of money to negative FiT, but I complained a lot and got refunded a lot of the service fees, hoping things would get better. Things have improved A LOT since then. The solar curtailment consistently works now, and I don't have ot keep an eye on the app to make sure it's not doing something funky. There seems to be a significant misunderstanding of the pricing forecasts on the app - they were previously reporting the NEM price, and making adjustments to export/import plans throughout the day based on this. This is still partly the case, however they have now considered other factors in their algorithm which seems to have made a big difference - quite consistently now the Smartshift feature has operated in a sensible way where we were able to make a good profit off of times of high demand, with ~200/month in earnings over the last few months with no input required from me.