For some months, there have been a bunch of complaints concerning the quality of customer support and billing services from Amber Electric. So, why has this happened?
Why Has Amber Customer Support Sucked?
The launch of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program saw sign-ups for Amber Electric, which provides households and businesses with direct access to the wholesale electricity market, increase about 5x.
Business is booming for Amber, especially with demand being pulled forward due to the May battery rebate drop; putting pressure on customer support. Added to that, around the same time the rebate went live the company was migrating their billing system to a new provider. Both hitting at once meant Amber’s customer response times blew out.
Here’s an example of a complaint from a frustrated Amber customer posted on the SolarQuotes blog; this one as recently as yesterday:
“Yes I am another disgruntled Amber client who consistently fail in their customer support– should be no support,” says Greg. “I have been with them for 5 months with no invoices and one reply to numerous emails, and no phone support. Started with all promises and but no action.”
We contacted Amber Electric to find out what’s up, and they said there was no denying the firm’s had a rough few months on customer service quality.
“Definitely a lesson learned on forecasting – we didn’t hire fast enough but we’re catching up now,” said Tim Barson; an Amber representative. “We’ve doubled the customer ops team over the last couple of months and are still hiring aggressively. Most billing issues are now resolved, and we’re investing in better self-service tools and clearer in-app info.”
You can find out more about what was going behind the scenes fueling the complaints in Neerav Bhatt’s1 interview with Amber Electric COO Neil Luo. Note that it’s nearly two months old now.
Why Are Battery Owners Flocking To Amber?
Unlike conventional energy retailers, the company’s Amber for Batteries service enables battery owners to buy and sell their stored energy at the wholesale market price, with the potential for high feed-in tariffs during the evenings and grid events.
There are also situations where you’re paid to consume (or store) grid electricity when the grid is awash with solar exports; forcing wholesale prices into negative territory. But in such situations, it means you might pay to export excess solar energy to the grid.
While the company offers some safeguards, Amber isn’t for everyone.
Amber Electric doesn’t whack any markup on the buy/sell rates, but instead is a subscription service costing a flat $25/month.
The opportunity to extract even more value from installing a home battery has tempted many owners since Amber for Batteries launched in 2022; which combined dynamic wholesale pricing and Amber’s SmartShift battery optimisation technology.
Among those owners was SolarQuotes’ Jono, who signed up with the firm in late 2022. You can read his 6-month and 12-month reviews of the service.
That last update was more than 2 years ago. But what does Jono think now after 3 years with the service? He says his Amber experience has been very positive, although he hasn’t needed to call on customer service.
No-one would argue that reliable, responsive customer service and effective communications when things aren’t going right aren’t super-important; particularly given Amber can be a hands-on affair to get maximum value from the service. It’s little wonder under the circumstances that the influx of customers getting familiar with it overwhelmed the firm, resulting in complaints.
Amber Alternatives
Hopefully Amber Electric is back on the right track.
But there are alternatives to Amber; such as the growing number of electricity plans from conventional retailers designed for battery owners. We compared those on offer from the “Big Three” electricity retailers early last month and there are others available. Then there are also Virtual Power Plant (VPP) programs that we compare here.
Another alternative is joining a Virtual Energy Network (VEN).
200,000 Battery Installation Milestone Passed
On a related note, just a quick update on CHBP uptake.
Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen announced on the weekend that since the beginning of July last year, 200,000 households have installed a battery.
“This is great for those 200,000 Australian families,” he said. “It’s also good for the grid because fewer people calling on coal fire in the evening means that our grid is more reliable and prices are cheaper because coal and gas are the most expensive form of energy; and renewables are the cheapest form of energy.”
From 1 July to 31 December 2025, 184,672 home batteries were installed and commissioned under the federal rebate. Based on when the Minister provided the 200,000 tally, around 958 systems a day have been installed and commissioned since the beginning of the year. But that’s if those batteries were being installed 7 days a week — it would be an average 1,393 per working day taking into account disruptions from holidays and weekends.
Footnotes
- Neerav Bhatt also writes for SolarQuotes from time to time, but the video above was created for his own Youtube channel – Electrifying Everything. ↩
About Michael Bloch
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I have been with amber for more than 4 years. Recently moved house, so closed the old account and opened a new one – they paid out my credits for the old house, then out of the blue started getting nasty emails that inowed the money. Repsibded to each text and email asking for a reconciliation (seeing as they had paid out credits that should have finalised it all) – and no human response for four months. Now an automated email telling me they are referring the account to a collection service – after being on hold for 2 hours on their phone service and being cut off – can tell you they are getting worse not better. Worse still is that their developer api service is now often overloaded and not returning pricing in a timely fashion on many occasions
Craig, that’s a disgrace on Ambers part, will be a black mark on your credit reports etc.
Did you contact your state industry ombudsman ?
Is amber really selling electricity in whole sell price or there is mark up? I used it a few months and look like scam to me
It’s not a scam, we’ve been with amber for about 5 years now. Their billing is among the most transparent on the market.
We have an EV, a battery since May, all electric home.
No it is not a scam as one of their good points is that they are transparrent about billing in terms of where the costs are coming from. Basically 50% of the bill comes from accessing the National Electricity Wholesale Market (NEM) and the other 50% comes from the Distributed Services Network Provider (DNSP) aka your ‘Poles and wires’ company.
In order to make Amber work for you see the follwing
-No solar panels or batteries ? Forget about it.
-Solar panels ? Yes you can make it work knowing your consumption patters and some load shifting.
-Solar Panels and batteries ? If you are not in increasoig credit, their is something wrong.
I quit amber at spring this year, and in 2 weeks time i see the solar feed in price is negative start at 9am, ( i need to pay amber or whoever if my solar panel have exceed electricity send to grid)
I wonder, if that really the whole sell price, why any other electricity company can possible pay something to their customer
Others offer a fixed feed in and fixed use tariff. The fixed feed in is often 6-10c. Amber is higher, and lower and perhaps negative. Using a battery you can choose when to export and when to curtail and when to buy. Without a battery you cant choose. I choose free consumption not paying $450-$800 a month and make around $8 a day on a bland day selling my power. Thats a extra $250 a month profit that pays for buying power and supply. Ironically i make more on real hot days and on coller cloudy days since i lower consumption then sell that too….when the price spikes!
I have a battery, and it is still so difficult to win. And the thing bothering me is not paying more or less, but rather the unfairness. I really doubt that the whole selling price gets negative at 9 am…
You must have a system compatible with their smartshift, and more importantly that curtails exports when FIT goes negative.
Also worth doing some digging on the FB Ambers User group, many states benefit more than others, even regions within some states.
Something is definitely wrong. Our first 6 months were all good averaging $100 credit/month. After our Sungrow inverter was replaced under warranty in October we’ve had onboarding issues with periods of up to several hours each afternoon when we are forced to import from the grid while our battery is 100% full, sometimes incurring big demand charges. Plus we can no longer export at all so no FIT and no taking advantage of price spikes. It’s costing us about $250/month. Many phone calls to support later, all of which are terminated – the only improvement is that they cut us off after the initial blurb rather than 10 minutes later now. The only response to email support requests are the automated once a month “we’re very sorry and you’re progressing in the queue”. I’ve done everything recommended in their FAQs. Not sure how much longer we can hang on and hope. Our investment in upsizing our battery was based on the Amber model, which is great when it works.
Is there a manual mode in the Sungrow app that can override Amber settrings ?
You can overide amber. It learns.
Yes. Use the Sungrow installer log in from the “Support” option on bottom of App. Go to
Local Access.
You will need to be in proximity to the inverter and theoretically press the button on the comms dongle 3 times. This is not strictly necessary if you go to the wifi settings on your smart device, and log into the inverter wifi – should be easily identifiable.
I also took a photo of the Qcode on the dongle so didnt have to scan that each time. But this isnt necessary either if you log into inverter wifi first.
You will need to know the admin password – google it and you will find it. P8888 seems to ring a bell.
In there you can go to
Settings
Energy Management Parameters
General Parameters
From there change “Energy Management Mode” /”self consumption” to
“Forced Mode” / “Discharge” to force a discharge or
“Stop” to stop a discharge or charge.
Alternatively to stop a charge or discharge change from “forced mode” back to “self consumption”, the default setting.
Further, the Isolarcloud relatively new feature to manually charge and discharge from the homeowner part of the app.
Click settings, the hex nut at top right of app screen.
Quick discharge allows –
– discharge at full discharge rate. for me that is 10kws subject to the feed in limitation
– discharge for a set period 2, 1 or 1/2 hour.
THis is a welcome new feature! that I only stumbled on today. Not sure how long it’s been there.
PS to my earlier post.
Be careful not to inadvertently mess with other config settings in the installer part of the app. I took screen shots of everything just in case…if only I could find them.
Its possible they dont know your new inverter. Its serial number is controlled not just any inverter. You may need to explain the change and ask for help.
They got my serial # wrong and it caused confusion. They started clean and a few days later it was working
Thanks Paul, I started just with the problem of going on grid when the battery was full, but after re-enrolling the new inverter to update the serial number it now doesn’t export either via smartshift or manual controls. It says it’s doing it but nothing happens. I expect something just needs to be tweaked by Amber at their end, so it’s the waiting game….2 months since my first support request.
Anita, make sure your DNSP has been advised about the new inverter, and checked if all still ok.
Call them yourself if need be.
I just have my slave inverter replaced under warranty, and I asked on completion if SAPN here in SA needed to be advised and ensure all ok.
The installer and their supervisor said as it’s a slave all ok.
It’s been cutting out every 15 minutes for 2 minutes at a time, meaning we lost about 45% of our panel production for 8 minutes every hour.
Not so much the little cost of it peaking hrrough here and there for grid use, but we couldn’t use all of our (up to) 9kw or so excess production, having to keep it about half usage.
About 7 weeks later it’s finally sorted TODAY !!
They found the inverter did reset every 15 mins because it was not again enrolled in SAPN Flexible Export program. Then it was noticed it had AGL VPP active (we don’t have a battery). Sorted with AGL. The slave inverter had its meter enabled so that a firmware downgrade was performed.
Hmm.
Yes, they really sell at wholesale rates.
The issue is that many customers don’t understand what the total electricity bill comprises.
To be frank, many people have joined Amber having totally unsuitable or incompatible systems and not having a clue what they are signing up for.
I’ve also seen several (unsubstantiated) reports of the battery installer signing them to Amber. It makes you wonder what type of commision they are getting.
Amber Bill = 0.5 x NEM access + 0.4 x DNSP charges + 0.1 x Gov = 1.0
approximately.
NEM = National Electricity Market – wholesale where the price of consumption is settleled on a per 5 min basis.
DNSP = Distributed Network Services Provider – the polls and wires company that hold a natural monoploly over the geographic area in which you live. Sometines, they csn also be gentailers.
Will NEM or DSNP start charging for solar feed-in tariffs at 9 am? If that is the case, how can other electricity companies survive?
“Will NEM start charging a FiT after 9.00am”
This is a market issue and depends on a variety of factors. For example, who is producing, who is consumming, what the weather is (temerature). If you and I can come up with a way to generate 1 MW, we can take part in selling energy into the NEM for a profit. That is the nature of a market economy.
“Will DNSP start charging a FiT after 9.00am”
These charges are set not by a market as indicated above, but are set by any particular (geographic) based DNSP – subsequent to agreement with the Australian Enegy Regulator (AER) on a per five year basis. To be of any further use, you really need to state the nearest town where you live.
In South Australia, the DNSP is SA Power Networks and the FiT is generally known as a Time of Use (ToU) tariff. In SA’s case as of July 1 2025, SAPN have imposed a $0.01 per kWh export tariff regardless of time of day.
Not sure what you mean by ‘survive’. It is an an abundance model, not a scarcity one.
I live at Stanhope Gardens in Sydney
Survive means that if the wholesale market is negative all day for solar feedin, aren’t they losing money as they pay to their customer for solar feedin?
> I live at Stanhope Gardens in Sydney
Then your DNSP that sets the Time of Use charfges is Endeavour Energy. The tariff structures themselves are published on the Australian Enenergy Regulator (AER) website. Here is the relevant text.
Export tariffs
Two-way export tariffs or “prosumer tariffs” relate to how customers are rewarded or charged for exporting excess energy that they generate back to the network, for example from rooftop solar. Export tariffs are cost-
reflective tariffs that can help to improve how the network is used, encourage more customers to purchase new technologies, and avoid the need for additional inefficient investment in the network.
For the 2024-2029 period, Endeavour Energy is proposing to enable existing customers to opt-in to an export tariff from 1 July 2024. From 1 July 2025, new and upgrading customers who export energy back to
the grid would be moved onto the export tariff but would be able to opt-out if they choose.
David . . .
“In South Australia, the DNSP is SA Power Networks and the FiT is generally known as a Time of Use (ToU) tariff. In SA’s case as of July 1 2025, SAPN have imposed a $0.01 per kWh export tariff regardless of time of day. ”
That’s the new ‘sun tax’ solar soak penalty came in July 1st last year.
Officially known as a two-way solar export tariff, designed to reduce grid congestion and maintain stability by encouraging users to consume their own solar energy or store it in a battery, rather than dumping it into the grid during the day when demand is low.
It only applies to exports between 10 am and 4 pm, typically when solar production is highest and grid demand is lowest.
There is a threshold before it kicks in, 9kwh on smart meters, 11kwh on other old accumulation meters.
SA Power Networks charges retailers 1 cent per kWh for smart meters / 0.75c for older meters, which is then passed on to consumers.
AGL dropped their FIT to 2c (from 4c) so obviously absorbed it in that.
Reading the Amber users facebook group for about 6 months, you can see the frustration with lack of service, maybe they’ve just grown too fast to keep up, or they haven’t bothered to face the extra cost of expanding their service staff, or can’t get decent staff.
One thing for sure, if your system is not very compatible with Amber, works with smartshift, be prepared to give it the good month learning process, it’s a waste of time unless you are prepared to micro manage, and who wants to bother with that long term ?
Even moreso with curtailment during negative FIT, many systems won’t do this and you can be caught badly . . . again unless micro managed.
If you can automate, have an EV etc, negative FIT would be exc being paid to charge.
Many depart to retailers with decent evening FIT deals, and that’s what we will do when battery time comes, stick to one of the smaller energy retailers offering 30c or so for a few hours in the evening, and 8c solar soak rate for the winter doldrums.
That is the point about Amber I suppose. Definetly not ‘set and forget’. You do not need to micromanage the system, just be necessarily interested in becoming a prosummer as opposed to a consumer. If you you want ‘set and forget’, yes go somewhere else.
Re the facebook users group, a lot of the problems come from basic user error dispite Ambers lack of custmer support. Oh and there is a chatbot on their website that basically can leap frog the appauling customer support depending on the issue.
Amber says solar edge is supported for smart shift, it’s been about a year since I started trying to get it moved onto smart shift. They say it’s a problem with solar edge but obviously they don’t want to update their website to indicate this. Yes the app is bare bones and hardly tells you anything and there is no login on their website.
I’ve got a SolarEdge system Inverters/EV charger
With 6.6 kWh Solar Panels and a SolarEdge battery plus backup.with help from Solarquotes ! I live in a townhouse with a narrow roof so have the biggest system I can get.
Joined Amber 3 months ago and found contacting Amber for help with enquires generally was a waste of time. Got some reply’s but only of a generic nature , with apologies etc of delays in replying. So by using the internet and You Tube, I generally worked out the best way of using Amber. South Australia has heaps of power during the day so curtailment is a must after the battery and EV is charged or excess payments could apply. Power Bills went from $60+ to $50 credit so very happy other than service enquires etc not good.
Also, if you have a look at the bottom of the home page of their website and click on FAQ, you will find a chatbot appears. It is actually very useful as it is using the Amber knowedlge base and responses to answer questions.
I have SolarEdge (SE) too and it basically works well, but have to admit it was not after some intervention on my part.
First there is the ownership issue. Unlike any other consumer product you (falsly) assume that the customer owns the product. When I informed Amber that there would be a change of inverter to SE on the account, they replied (!) and said there was a period of time where the ownership of the inverter had to be transfered from the installer group to them ! So be it but did not endovour to find out why.
All was well and the inverter sucessfully blocked any negative Feed in Tariff (FiT) *until* I had an SE periferal device – a load sheduler – installed to shift loading the Hot Water Service from the Controlled Load tarif to the solar sponge tariff – basiclly get the hot water from the solar panels. Net result SE had to replace the comms board to get it to work. Installers either love or hate SE so best to get someone who is trained on them.
Yeah, I’ve seen lots of disgruntled Amber customers posting online about their experience in the last few months.
This interview is the first i have heard of Amber trying to manage the situation, which is a shame – their brand name and trust value as such has certainly taken a big hit.
They are really the cutting edge of using the technology to get away from the control of the big gentailers. As such, we do not want them to fail, we want them to be the leaders in a new model that gets as much traction as possible.
I’ve been an Amber customer since December 2024. Customer service was acceptable until July, notwithstanding the odd billing issue, but it’s nosedived since then. Inquiries on technical matters are met with bot responses and complaints go unacknowledged. The only way to get answers – and this is hit and miss – is to join the Facebook user forums and hope to run into a kindly Amber employee willing to help.
We’ve been with Amber since Feb 2024 & despite constantly being told “were growing so fast we just can’t keep up” nothing has changed re Customer support. Our reality is when it works it’s good, when it doesn’t, don’t waste your time trying to get help.
I saw Neeravs interview on YouTube he’s worth a suscribe asks all the right questions !!
I hope amber sort it out before v2g goes mainstream it’s a big opportunity for them !!
Thanks for your support Peter and thanks Michael for embedding my video.
V2G is the biggy and they have Federal Government support to conduct trials with vehicle manufacturers including Tesla. Hopefully it does not blow Amber out of the water.
A government subsidy for v2g inverters/chargers would be helpful in the future !!
V2g will hopefully help amber because of bigger batteries
I have been a big Amber fan for four years, but I left them last week. I had a new battery installed and I just needed them to release the old battery. I waited weeks for email support, then rang twice.
The support line says they are only responding to emergencies. Even if you wait though, they disconnect the call after 10 minutes. It seems my only option was to bail to get them to free my battery.
I get they are booming, great, I’m pleased about that. I like their product. But the battery rebate has been running for more than six months. I dont understand why a base-skill person couldn’t answer the phone and triage calls by now.
I was with Amber for a couple of months but in Qld the wholesale FiT was consistently negative during the day and the evening FiT was almost always around 10c or less. Not great.
I ended up moving to AGL for a guaranteed 3c FiT plus an additional guaranteed 25c FiT from 5 pm to 9 pm plus an additional $1 FiT if my battery is used as part of AGL’s VPP. AGL’s offer is great for my system size and usage.
Agree. The evening FiT in Qld has collapsed. While that pleases me on one level, it doesn’t help with the economics of using Amber.
Might be an article there for SQ. Has Qld’s duck curve been turned into ChrisB duck pancakes?
Mixed bag, sadly they are often the middleman between network and your infrastructure. Fortunately our Sig system has been working rock solid for 5 months, where my friend has been battling issues even to connect similar system for a couple of months.
Very sorry about the customers receiving poor service from Amber. I joined Globird in July last year and like Amber they have seen explosive growth as a result of the battery boom yet their customer service is still excellent, never waited more that 24 hours for a response from their Australian Based team.
I joined Amber some time ago as an enthusiastic supporter of their philosophy and was looking forward to maximising the benefits of their wholesale pricing by installing a battery. However their total and utter lack of response despite repeated attempts to contact them left me utterly disillusioned and disappointed. Shopping around for another provider I rang OVO three times across a week to discuss aspects of their 3 for free electricity plan. Each time they answered the phone and gave clear, accurate and detailed advice. What brilliant customer service! I was hooked. I set my battery up to soak up the free electricity between 11am and 2pm each day and am now living on free electricity (when storms don’t trip my battery…).
Why are storms tripping your battery
I was with Amber for 3 or 4 months. I submitted a request for information on how to apply for a VPP or similar. The only responses I got were “we’re working on getting back to you”. In frustration I shifted to AGL. To tell you the truth, I’m not too happy with them either. I thought I was signing to both a VPP, and participation in a Peak Demand Feed in system. No indication yet that this has happened.
My economics of putting in a battery were fully predicated on Amber, viz:
Access to really low cost+high renewables charging and usage for the home battery and EV. Plus income earnings potential on exports – may Eraring blow up badly, unpredictably & often in the extra two twilight years it now has!
Not surprised by the startup growing pains, I have found the best thing to do is use the “Battery Booster” mode of Smartshift and manually override once or twice a day and definitely when things get exciting with a price spike and everything clogs.
What I like about Amber is the what-you-see-is-what-you-get pricing. All other retailers try to play the give a bit with one hand and take a lot with the other with deals only someone with a quant-finance degree can actually evaluate …
We’ve had our 32 kWh Sigenergy system for 4 months now, currently with Origin, and slightly in credit. Like many others, we’ve watched the Amber problems with disappointment. Don’t want to make the switch and end up worse off. I guess we’ll just bide our time and see if this works out, or if the other providers come up with something worthwhile.
Good Day All,
This is most informing site , thanks to those for setting it up writing.
I appreciate all your feedback provided todate.
I’m about to sign up with Amber with a compatible brand of battery the Fox ESS
41.93 kWh usable capacity & Longi 6.65 kW Solar Panels to be added to my 7 yrs old 5.2 kW Solar Panels , thus providing me 11.85 kW to generate electricity for my usage along with selling to back The Amber System .
I would appreciate any feedback on any pitfalls or back-up suggestions you would like share with me and others on this site.
Thanking you in advance.
Given the tenor of these responses, the best way forward might be if you go to the Amber website and down the bottom of the page there is a link to FAQ. When you click on this, an AI Chatbot appears which you can address with natural language questions. Please do not discount it. It is a Large Language Model (LLM) that uses Ambers’ knowledge base so it is suprisingly good at pointing you in the right direction if it cannot answer your question directly.
the Amber facebook user group I have found a bit ‘hit and miss’. There is a lot of user error (eg does not understand the manual mode of the Amber app to override ‘set and forget’) and sometimes you get suspended for asking reasonable questions.
Thanks for this article. Unfortunately the comments above do not give me any hope that I can stay with Amber.
We finally got our Smart Meter installed two weeks ago, and were excited to start selling power to the grid etc. Unfortunately, Amber is now charging us as though we are using more electricity that that generated by our solar panels plus that which we draw down from our battery combined.
When I ring, they hang up after 10 – 12 mins of holding. The two tickets I have raised have gone unanswered. I now have a usage bill of $108 for 12 days, despite using only 0.3 kWh from the grid. This is solely usage. Because of the Demand Tariff pricing, plus network charges, plus subscription to Amber, we will likely get a bill of more than double that for the last 10 days.
According to their FAQ, the problem is likely that they did not onboard us correctly when they took control.
Has anyone else had this problem? Was it solved?
Sure. Document the problem, show how you have tried to resolve the matter with them, then contact your Energy Ombudsman in your State.
When we had our 3 phase Sungrow inverter & battery installed, the installers connected the CTs incorrectly and this gave rise to incorrect readings which propagated through to our electricity bill at the time, we were with Red Energy at the time. Fortunately the installers returned promptly to fix the problem. Might be worth checking.
Not to bore everyone with the 5 month timeline of back and forth about a tariff dispute,involving both the Energy Regulator and the DNSP. Amber did their best to confuse and stall the issue.Quite annoying to be asked by the Amber Customer rep ,’when are you goinf to drop the ombudsman complaint ?”. In the end the Ombusman did their job and offered a compromise ‘.
Much worse than their appauling attitude to customer service. they failed to line up their metering partner ‘Blue Current (BC) for a smart meter install 9 weeks in advance of the install date quoted by the installer and the DNSP**. To put not too fine a point on it,, it was a life threatening situation where Blue Current did not turn up. I subsequently rang BC as to why and they said they had no work order from Amber.
It might help if their advertising campaign did not make a vailed attempt to refer to their SA customers as ‘Revolting’ -an irony lost on most.
Localvolts is the only other retailer offering wholesale market participation. They’re only a small outfit now, but I hope they manage their growth better than Amber has done.
Flowpower also has a wholesale offer – but only for their big industrial customers. Really hope they expand that offer/program.
I switched to Amber without fully reviewing comments and I’ve regretted the switch within the first month. First bill was just over $100. I cancelled the service which took an additional two week and cost me an extra $45.
At the time the app didn’t show the total cost, and this the extra fees.
For one peak demand period I paid 1151 cents per Kw/hr and was stung $60.
I don’t recommend Amber, but if you’re with them and it’s working, all the best.
The planning is great, but the implementation has been terrible. Last time I looked on their website, there is an Engineering Manager job going for $A250k ! Too old now.
Is it Amber’s fault that you are on a Demand Tariff? Nope.
Did you understand what a Demand Tariff was when you agreed to the tariff from you DNSP? Probably not.
The simple solution is to go to a on-demand tariff if available.
on-demand tariff? You probably mean TOU Tariff (Time of Use tariff).
I’ve 2 separate 6.6 kw panel/5 kw inverter/15 kw battery systems on/in my house, the brand is GROWATT.
I talked to AMBER about their contract and they said “we don’t deal/use/work with GROWATT…
What brands do they deal with?
If you go to there website (no links allowed here), go down to the bottom of the home page and click on the FAQ link. An AI chatbot will appear which is remarkable good at replying to natural language questions. If you ask it what inverters are capable of using smartShift, it will take you to the relevant. page.
The elephant in the room.
Why do they keep advertising like crazy when they can’t service the customers they already have? We waited nearly 2 months to have my name added to the account. They did let us know they were under stress, but that has never been the case before.
Let’s call a spade a spade. They’re on a manic growth phase and really have no care for their customers – otherwise they’d slow the advertising down until they get some semblance of customer service under control.
We signed up and have emailed a couple of critical questions 4 months ago with Zero response. Also tried on the phone = total waste of time.
16kw sigenergy panel and battery system and now we’re considerably worse off $wise than when we were getting fixed feed-in of 7c.
Now will ask ACCC to investigate clear misleading and deceptive behaviour. All feathers, no meat!
It’s unfortunate Amber customer service was overwhelmed by the volume of customer contacts but it’s understandable their management probably tried to cater for expected demand but were caught off guard by the significantly higher volume of contacts. Even the federal government didn’t expect demand for battery take up to be anywhere near as high as it was hence why they had to pump more funding in and amend the rebate levels and timeframes.
It’s great so many people are going solar storage so quickly (on top of the high number of home solar systems) so it’s mainly a positive situation with a few growing pains but companies like Amber are providing win-win affordable new options for all of us who embrace renewable energy rather than fossil fuels.
Also, while this may be temporarily frustrating, I have had extremely frustrating lack of contact from a major for-profit health fund because they did nothing to prevent issues from huge volume increase due to a situation they caused.
Sounds like a free platform to list excuses and do the hard sell of an electricity retailer that is performing poorly. From a platform that doesn’t miss an opportunity to stick the knife into a shoddy good or service.
I thought the roll of solar quotes was to recommend reliable goods and services related to solar.
Solar quotes have never offered a criticised company an opportunity to explain themselves before. Is there a reason why amber doesn’t get the same treatment as other shoddy retailers?
Hi Brian,
We do offer reviews without fear or favour.
And seeing as we now have a real trained, qualified and experienced journalist on staff, people get a right of reply.
Not all of them exercise it, some threaten legal action, some get sh!tty and email back at 3am on publication day.
We’re just trying to get to the truth.
I’ve been wondering about this exact question.
It’s funny I actually applied for a role in the Amber support team. I’m an enthusiastic about renewables especially batteries and haven’t heard back.
I’m surprised, with my experience in customer service and IT delivery I’m sure I would have been a strong candidate.
I joined Amber in April 2024 with 10kW solar and 13.3kWh battery. This was leading into winter. I had to turn SmartShift off for most of winter because it does not know enough about my situation. I’m all electric, no gas, and our heat-pump ducted heating/cooling system can draw a lot of power (over 5kW). We’re on a peak/off-peak set of tariffs. Letting SmartShift run meant running out of battery before peak tariff was finished (9pm) and it even tried to sell precious battery when the feed-in was high ($15). Now I have 33kWh of battery and can mostly leave SmartShift enabled, but I need it to do more. It can’t handle the situation mentioned above where the price of grid power goes negative. I have to manually intervene each day and use Home Assistant to notify me when a dispatch mode is set that I don’t want.
I too have outstanding support requests with Amber, for many months now. I’m hoping they can staff up because no-one else gives quite the same access to wholesale.
The tariff structure actually comes from the DNSP so suggest you access their website to see what options are abvailable to you. Otherwise, if you are not in increasing billing credit with said setup, definetly something wrong. Energy Ombudsman ?
Well, the whole point of Amber is to be able to sell electricity back to the grid for a high Feed in Tariff (FIT). So selling at $15 per kWh means you would get $150 for 10kWh fed into the grid, and you are still complaining? On the other hand you can use electricity at times when usage rates are very low – in my region and tariff that’s in summer from 8am to 4pm where prices are very low and sometimes in spring even negative.
What you would need to do in that situation when the FIT is $15/kwh and the usage rate even higher, is defer your usage to the shoulder period where usage costs are much much lower than during the peak time.
To be fair, Amber has many articles on their website to explain this and also articles about negative FIT periods and curtailment.
If you don’t understand these basics and if your solar and battery system is compatible, I think Amber is not for you because there is a risk that you get caught out during usage price spikes in the wholesale electricitymarket
I was just trying to explain my situation. I’m disappointed in Amber, not upset with them; but I can understand why a lot of people are.
The evening of $15 feed-in was also $20 grid usage. Thus if I had drained my battery to earn maybe $45, I would have then had to pay much more than $45 to keep my heater and the rest of the house running. I perfectly understand my situation, the capabilities of my system, and Amber’s capabilities.
I really want Amber to succeed as I believe they provide the best opportunity for me to eventually have a setup that I don’t need to monitor and automatically just does the right thing in terms of avoiding paying for grid power and making money when possible. At the moment it does not always make the best choices and I’m having to manually perform dispatches and inverter settings adjustments.
I have always seen that for Amber to be successful, then besides the totally smartshift / cutrailment compatibility, you really need about triple your homes ‘safe’ battery (own needs overnight) to play with on the market.
Of course the ability to charge that daily in all seasons too.
From what I’ve read, those $15 spikes are so rare, usually when a power station or other infrastucture goes down, and they are often only be for a few minutes, quite often they are over or half over before the system can kick in or manual intervention to export.
Mostly now people are getting 10c, 15c type ranges of early evening FITs (still ok), but it can vary so much state to state, regions within states.
Negative FITs are becoming a lot more common now, so if one has the EV, large applaince needs, you can get paid to use power, 2c, 4c, I saw a post on Amber FB group 4 weeks ago with SA getting 20c negative FIT, and those seem to last a lot longer than minutes during solar soak hours, usually hours at -.
Dear Amber COO Neil, do not use the excuse of a changing billing provider to unwittingly overcharge your customers due to poor data quality practices using the the guise of the Network Electricity Rules, Rule 30 in particular. As an organisation you are actually very lucky that I accepted a compromise from the SA Energy Ombudsman regarding your billing practices and did not pursue the matter further.
Otherwise I had it in mind to start a civil class action lawsuit to recover an estimated $A1 million, that is right $1,000,000 as a result of the false and misleading explanation from your CEO. Recommend enfranchising your customers and not disenfranchising them. Remember, you exist because of us, not the other way around and consider this period a shot across your bows.
This is despite the fact I am in SA and am revolting- an irony and reference to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and an oblique reference lost on most .Do better
I’m another “victim” of the billing system. The only solution I found was to leave, but still waiting on invoices from July 25.
No invoice = No accountability and worse no credit refunds for me as I was contributing plenty in peak hours. My money is just waiting for them to figure out how to make an invoice.
If I was owing money, maybe they wouldn’t be so slow.
Yes Amber have customer service response problems but they are not alone, as many other solar Cos are not so quick or reasonable in their response to customer problems. For instance, I have been trying to sort out an iinstallation issue with Solaray and their new parent Co for more than 5 years and it’s painfully slow to get a response.
I left Amber totally frustrated and disappointed with looong delays in responding to emails, and the inability to have any back and forth conversation to fix issues in a timely manner. (no phone contact available, even with responses to tech support). Their tech staff seem up to speed, but there were too few of them. Amber have been saying for at least 2 years that delays are due to recent rapid growth in customer numbers, so I don’t think they can keep using that as an excuse. Also at the time I left, Amber told me that they could not do load-following solar curtailment on my Sungrow SH10RS, but when I changed to Powston as the management system, they could do this curtailment (when negative FiT). Their rapid growth was at the expense of existing customers.
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I’d been with Amber for four days and received a 110 bill for 11 days. That’s 10 a day, which equates to 3600 a year! Prior to Amber I used to use nothing from the grid, now their system is drawing from the grid and costing me money. Trying to call them is impossible
Greedy kill business, amber just scam to me
Why is my “buy” price lower than my “sell” price? AI at Amber tell me its due to the network pricing being added to the buy but not the sell. Thats counter-intuitive. Please explain.
WIf my live prices are true then I can charge my battery at 9 cents and sell straight away at 43 cents, and keep on doing that all day. What am I missing here?
Yes, there are now many documented examples on here of Amber being less than honest. Of course, what makes it considerably worse is the fact that they will not talk to you. I’ve been trying for about 5 months without any success whatsoever.
It’s good of Solar quotes to host this forum but it needs to go further.
I’m going to begin a case for the ACCC to look into their misleading and deceptive claims (amongst other things) and suggest that Solar Quotes might play a hosting/collation role here to help all of us “keep the bastards honest”
Solar Quotes: you could play a real role here?
Dear Michael,
What do you think? Will you help all your people on here who are having massive problems with Amber (who are clearly not prepared to do anything at all)?
You and Solar Quotes can really help here by coordinating all of us who have been so badly treated, let down and most likely ‘ripped off’ by helping to collate info etc. for more formal complaints to the regs, ACCC, Ombudsman etc.???