Amber Electric (Australia) Custom Component

Do you see any errors in the logs?

My guess is you are a new customer and you don’t have a site yet, so it’s failing.

Email your account details to [email protected] and I can check on our end

An official integration has been accepted into Home Assistant. It should be in tomorrow’s beta release, with a full release in two weeks (October release: version 2021.10).

However, there are some breaking changes to the custom component. See: https://github.com/madpilot/hass-amber-electric

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I have just installed the new integration for Amber. I am getting the following channels

  • General Forecast $/kWh
  • General Price $/kWh
  • Renewables %
  • Price Spike - Binary.
    However I am not getting the General channel - The the channel that records all your power usage from your lights and appliances
    Any suggestions on what might be going wrong?

General Price and General Forecast are the prices and forecasts for the general channel. I would expect that many sensors to be created if you only have a general channel.

I love the idea of the integration however I’m new to this. (and pretty new to HA)
The Amber integration is only showing 4 entities. I was expecting an entity that would show me the actual usage.

Screenshot 2021-10-11 193322

Ah. No, we can’t show usage at the moment, because of the way Home Assistant and the Amber API works. (Home Assistant needs real-time data, the Amber API is 24-hour delayed)

We are working on it though! We hope to be a able to show it in the Energy dashboard eventually.

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Ok, thanks for your help. Plus, thanks for all your work on the integration. I look forward to seeing the improvements.

Further investigation, to capture near real time data, I am likely to connect a pulse sensor to the Jemana power meter. I’ll use the Home Assistant Glow setup.

The Jemena meters supports Zigbee, plus they have offered in home displays for usage in the past. There are integration steps through their portal. Potentially a bit off topic but has anyone done a DIY integration with a Jemena meter? (relevant to many in Victoria, Australia.)

No, but I can voucher the Zigbee integration. I use an rainforest Eagle 200.

It only seems to increment in kWh resolution though, which is weird

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Hi
I just signed up with Amber. Generated API key and tried to add the integration (Configuration-> Add integrations-> Amber Electric. Added my API key and submit but nothing happen. Integration does not get added. Could you kindly help. I am running HA core-2021.10.5, supervisor-2021.10.0. I tried in 2021.10.4 and did not work so I upgraded to 10.5 still same result.

Note: I joined on-line and my account was active. I am still in the cooling period so my account has not got transferred to Amber from origin. However Amber allow me to go to setting, enable developer mode and hove a name for generate API key

I can see you only signed up two hours ago - in a day or two, you site will start appearing in the API, and you’ll be able to start using the integration.

We are working speeding this up (and I have a ticket to have been error messaging in HA)

Thank you so much for the quick response. I am happy to wait as the transfer will take up to day working days

Hi All,

I am looking to switch provider since Powershop has been purchased by Shell and was looking at Amber.
I am a bit confused about the rest api, is it possible to get personal usage and charge, integrate in the energy tab of HA?

Thanks

Hey @mcvicthor,

We aren’t able to show usage just yet, as there is a slight Home Assistant re-architecture required (Which is close AFAIK) because we don’t have real-time usage yet. Once that is done there is some work to do on our end to integrate with that new API.

The best bet to get realtime data in the energy tab now is to use a third party integration like an Eagle 200 or clamp meter or LED light pulse counter. You can use the price sensor to show the price in the Energy tab.

Thanks for this integration (I guess we should move discussion out of Custom Components now)

Just went through my first price spike:

Home Assistant seemed to track everything correctly, with the spike from 0900 through to 0903:

Price spiking at $7.15 / kWh:

Question about automation, I can see how I can setup an automation to switch off loads (heating, a/c, EV charging and the like) with the Price Spike attribute, but that only covered the window from 0900 - 0903, but I understand Amber bills in 30 minute blocks, so do I want to turn my loads off for the 30 minutes after the price spike event?

The good thing is automatically turning the A/C off for for 3 minutes or 30 minutes won’t be noticed by anyone, except the person paying the bills :slight_smile:

Just for reference, the same spike on NEM ($9,421/ MWh):

The price you pay for is the price in the last 5-minutes of the interval - The first 25 minutes are actually irrelevant to the final price, but useful for predictions. Except we predicated wrong here - because the price dropped for the remaining 25 minutes, the price came out at around 30c.

The simplest solution is to be super conservative, and turn everything off for 30 minutes.

The slightly smarter solutions would be to do what we do with notifications: If the current interval is a spike and the next interval is predicated to be a spike, still call it a spike, though that is a bit harder using the API in home assistant because it doesn’t expose the five minute prices.

I hope that helps? I’ll see if I can come up with a blueprint at some point that does some of this.

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Any idea why I would only be seeing one of the sensors? Have been trying for hours, uninstalled, reinstalled, rebooted.

When did you sign up?

That can happen if you are a brand new user and the network hasn’t processed your transfer request.

Give it a day or two, restart HASS, and you should be fine.

If you aren’t a new user, what term are you filtering the entities on?

Yep! New user, a few days. Thanks heaps for the quick reply. I’ll give it some time!

Generally it’s good to go in two business days. Though guessing which customer you are, I reckon you’ll be good on Monday.