SmartShift has one job: make your home battery work harder for you.
Behind that fairly simple idea is a lot of complexity. SmartShift needs to understand what’s happening at your home - forecast your solar generation and energy use, respond to wholesale electricity prices and network tariffs, and then decide when it makes sense to charge, discharge or hold onto energy.
And as more customers connect more types of batteries, solar systems and other devices, there are more combinations for SmartShift to understand.
Over the past six months, we’ve made a series of improvements to how SmartShift works, from better forecasting and demand charge protection under the hood, to giving customers much more visibility when something isn’t working as expected.
And soon, we’re opening up more of that development process to customers through SmartShift Labs.
Here’s what’s changed.
More visibility into the health of your system
One of the biggest improvements has been to how we communicate when something isn’t working properly.
SmartShift relies on a connection with your battery and solar system to receive data and send commands. Sometimes that connection can be interrupted, or a device might stop responding as expected.
Previously, it wasn’t always obvious what was happening when this occurred.
We’ve now built a much clearer system health experience into the Amber app, covering battery commands, solar commands, device data and connectivity.
If SmartShift detects an issue, customers can see more information about what’s happening and what they can do next. That might mean checking whether there’s a known issue affecting their inverter brand, following a troubleshooting guide, or letting us know if they’ve spotted something unusual.
It also gives our team better information to identify patterns and investigate emerging issues.
The aim is simple: if something is preventing SmartShift from controlling your system as expected, you should be able to see that rather than having to work it out yourself.
Getting better at understanding more complicated homes
Home energy systems are getting more complex.
A customer might have a battery from one manufacturer, an inverter from another and solar equipment from another. Some homes have multiple batteries, inverters or other devices connected at the same site.
Over the past six months, we’ve made significant improvements to how SmartShift handles these configurations, particularly for customers with multiple brands or devices enrolled.
That’s important because SmartShift’s decisions depend on having an accurate model of what’s happening at your home. It needs to understand the equipment available, how much energy your home is using, how much solar you’re likely to generate and what your battery can do.
We’ve improved the reliability of how those different devices are configured within SmartShift, helping make sure we’re modelling and forecasting each site correctly.
The more accurately SmartShift understands your setup, the better placed it is to make decisions about when to charge, discharge or hold onto your energy.
A lot has changed under the hood, too
Not every SmartShift improvement comes with a new button in the app.
We’ve also been continually refining the optimisation itself, including improvements to how SmartShift forecasts household energy use and protects customers from demand charges.
Demand tariffs work differently to standard usage tariffs. Rather than your bill being based only on how much electricity you use, part of your network charge can be determined by your highest electricity demand during particular windows.
That changes the calculation for your battery.
SmartShift needs to weigh up the value of using or exporting energy now against the possibility that you’ll need that stored energy later to avoid drawing heavily from the grid during a demand window.
We’ve been improving that logic, alongside broader upgrades to our load forecasting, so SmartShift has a better picture of how much energy your home is likely to need.
These changes aren’t necessarily obvious when you open the app, but they’re a big part of how SmartShift continues to improve.
SmartShift Labs
We also want customers to have a bigger role in what we build.
SmartShift Labs has just gone live, a new area of the Amber app where customers can try experimental SmartShift features before they’re released more widely.
You are able to turn individual Labs features on and off, try them with your own system and send feedback directly to the developer working on them.
One of the first experiments is Earnings Optimiser Plus.
It takes SmartShift’s existing Earnings Optimiser mode further by acting on smaller opportunities, not just the bigger ones. That means your battery can trade more often throughout the day.
We’re also testing a Demand window buffer for customers on demand tariffs. It works by keeping more charge in your battery ahead of a demand window, giving you a bigger buffer on days when your energy use is higher than forecast rather than having to draw that extra energy from the grid.
They’re experimental features, so they won’t necessarily be right for every customer or every system. That’s exactly why we’re putting them in Labs first.
Customers can try them, switch them off whenever they like and tell us what they think. We can use that feedback to keep improving the features before deciding whether they’re ready for a wider release.
SmartShift will keep changing
There isn’t really a point where SmartShift is “finished”.
Electricity markets change. Network tariffs change. New batteries and inverters enter the market. Customers connect bigger and more complicated energy systems to their homes. And as SmartShift manages more batteries, we keep finding ways to make the automation smarter, more reliable and more transparent.
Over the past six months, that’s meant better information when something goes wrong, more reliable configurations, better forecasts and smarter optimisation. SmartShift Labs is the next step, giving customers a chance to try some of what we’re building and help shape where it goes next.
Already using SmartShift? Keep an eye out for SmartShift Labs in the Amber app over the next couple of weeks, and let us know what you think when you start experimenting.
Not with Amber yet? See how SmartShift can automate your home battery and help you get more value from your energy.
