Amber Electric Solplanet Inverter/Battery Controller

Introduction

This repository contains a small local controller for Solplanet battery/inverter systems on Amber Electric pricing.

It exists for a specific use case: you want battery behavior to respond to Amber price signals, but you do not want to depend on Home Assistant or a larger automation stack to do it.

Links

• Heavily inspired by Home Assistant Integration - I was having trouble with HACS so wrote my own.

Problem

Solplanet exposes a local HTTP API, and Amber exposes current price and tariff metadata, but there is no simple built-in controller that ties the two together for:

• charging on very cheap import pricing
• discharging on favorable feed-in pricing
• respecting demand windows
• keeping battery SOC within practical bounds
• failing safely when communications are unreliable

This repository is that controller.

What The Controller Does

On each loop, the controller:

1. reads battery telemetry from the local Solplanet API
2. reads current Amber price intervals
3. decides whether to charge, discharge, or fallback
4. applies that decision using the local Solplanet control API

The fallback action is self-consumption mode.

Control Approach

The controller is intentionally simple and conservative.

It uses:

• Amber general pricing to decide when charging is allowed
• Amber feed-in pricing to decide when discharge/export is attractive
• battery SOC guards to stop charge/discharge outside configured bounds
• high-SOC price guards so charging above 70% SOC only happens when import pricing is below 5 c/kWh by default
• demand-window guards so charge windows do not run into the daily demand period
• short, backdated schedule windows so stale commands naturally expire quickly if comms fail

That last point matters: this project is designed around the reality that inverter control can be unreliable. The scheduling strategy reduces the blast radius of missed updates.

Why Someone Else Might Use This

If you have the same ingredients:

• Solplanet inverter with local API access
• Amber Electric pricing
• interest in battery arbitrage or price-aware battery control

then this repository gives you a working starting point for local control without having to reverse-engineer the Solplanet control path from scratch.

Configuration

The controller reads local configuration from .env:

• SOLPLANET_HOST
• SOLPLANET_BATTERY_SN
• AMBER_SITE_ID
• AMBER_API_KEY

See .env.example.

Useful CLI tuning knobs:

• --charge-target-soc default 97
• --discharge-target-soc default 40
• --high-soc-charge-threshold default 70
• --high-soc-cheap-price default 5.0

Logging

Runtime logs are written as NDJSON so the output can be analysed later for controller behavior and battery/arbitrage history.

Typical event types include:

• battery_state
• decision
• dry_run
• applied
• error

Running

Install dependencies:

make install

Check the script:

make check

Run the live controller loop:

make run

Run it without applying changes:

make dry-run