It’s John here, CTO of Amber. You know we like to do energy differently to the others. So here’s a quick update on some of the amazing improvements we’ve been busy working on to make Amber the best customer experience we can imagine. 

Introducing, our top 3 tech updates that are ready and waiting for you:

• 1. Green grid notifications: How will you know when cheap renewables are flooding the grid in your area? Simple, thanks to our  “Greenest Grid” notifications, which act like a friendly tap on the shoulder to help you make the most of these times.
• 2. Single login for multiple households: We know admin is a pain in the butt so we’ve cut down the time it takes to manage multiple households with a single Amber login.
• 3. SmartShift upgrades: As solar home batteries start to take off, we’re releasing some serious upgrades to our SmartShift technology, to help owners make huge savings on their bills and drive more renewables. 

Read on for more, or reach for your phone now and download version 4.11 of the Amber app from the App Store. Done.  

Get your “Greenest Grid” on

Since launching Amber we’ve been using emails, SMS, and push notifications to let you know when the grid is at its dirtiest and most expensive, so you can try to reduce your energy usage at these times.

That’s been a great way to help you reduce your bills and bring down the profits of big polluters, but, being glass half full kind of people, we thought why not focus on the positive and let customers know when the energy grid is at its greenest and cheapest. 

With our “Greenest Grid” notifications, customers can ramp up their energy-use during these green windows, knowing renewables are flooding the grid and the price of energy is at its lowest. 

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Thanks to the growth of wind and solar generation, there are some days when the amount of renewables are shining bright in the grid.  When these awesome green days come along, you’ll receive a special notification at the beginning of the greenest two hour period so you can make the most of cheap, abundant renewable energy.

To switch on “Greenest Grid” notifications in your app, head to your settings screen and hit the toggle..

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Manage multiple households with one Amber login

We’re going to come clean here - in the earlier versions of our app, having Amber as your electricity retailer in multiple households was a pain. The way we had it, you needed an Amber account for each address and switching between them meant logging out and in again. 

You needed to have an Amber account for each one. 

Switching it was also a minor hassle for customers moving houses, who had the same user experience during the short overlapping period before moving into their new place.  

To cut a long story short, you can now have as many addresses connected to your account as you need. Heck, we could support the property portfolio of your average bitcoin billionaire.To switch between them, just pop over to the settings page and hit the button next to the address details.

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We’ve also made it super easy for customers to move house or add extra properties directly within the app. You’ll see a range of options for adding or changing addresses in the app settings.

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Big news for battery owners

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There’s nothing like an energy crisis to make people realise that things have gotta change. And right now we’re seeing a huge interest in solar batteries, that powerful piece of kit that can give homeowners the edge in an over-cooked energy market.  

Luckily for Amber customers, we saw this one coming, and have been working hard on our automation technology for solar batteries, known as SmartShift.

SmartShift sits at the cutting edge of our mission towards a 100% renewables grid and allows customers to automate their battery to trade on the energy market by charging from cheap renewables and then discharging to the grid when wholesale energy prices are high. Already SmartShift is earning customers hundreds of dollars a year and helping push more renewables into the grid to drive down the profits of big fossil fuel polluters. 

Amber SmartShift is currently compatible with Tesla Powerwall, SolarEdge and LG batteries, with plans to integrate with other lower cost home batteries in the coming months.

So alongside the important work of optimising the algorithm that powers SmartShift, the team has also been busy improving how SmartShift will look and feel inside the Amber app. Through our SmartShift beta project, we’ve been testing and refining exciting new product features designed to give customers more control over their battery and full visibility on how it's saving them money every day.

We’ll be opening these new features to a lot more customers in the coming months as our battery project moves from beta to full launch with a bunch of new improvements.

Without spoiling the big reveal, here’s a few of the big improvements coming up:

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1. Oversee your system in real time: View your live solar generation, household usage, grid usage/export and solar battery charge/discharge.
2. Explore SmartShift’s plan: A full breakdown of what SmartShift is planning to do with your battery over the next half-day in response to your forecast usage, solar generation and price.
3. Direct your battery your way: SmartShift is smart, but sometimes you can be smarter based on what’s happening in your world. We’re adding in-app controls so you can tell your home battery what to do and when.
4. Review system activity and impact: After your solar battery has acted on instructions from you or from SmartShift, we’ll unpack the daily activity of your system, showing what happened and why, alongside the environmental and financial result.

If you’d like to sign up for SmartShift, drop us a line here. If you’re interested in buying a battery, we can also help you get one at fair cost. 

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