FoxESS Community - Owners & Installers Forum

Anyone have any idea why my full battery is not being used to service the house load but the system insists on puling from the grid. it was working fine and then i swapped over to Amber Energy (Australia) and its been playing up

Not personally familiar with Amber but not taking power from battery usually indicates a schedule is running that has raised the minSoC (battery reserve), or set the work mode to ‘backup’ rather than Self Use, it can also be as a result of a Grid Charge period set without ‘charge from grid enabled’, if you are not using these they must be disabled i.e. set to 00:00-00:00.

Yea def no grid charge enabled. I’ve read about it happening to others but no real fix yet. Might have to update firmware.

These are my current settings and you can see full battery and still pulling from grid.

And then as soon as there’s a tiny amount of PV coming through, the battery stays doing something but not all of the load. I’m stumped

In your 2nd schedule, you have 0W as your FD Pwr.

In the past, this would allow system to convert your systems power for DC/AC conversion.
I believe a while back, this swapped to a literal setting, so you may have 0W of DC being converted to AC from your battery.

Try setting this to 8000W (or whatever your inverter spec can convert)


EDIT: I just realised that Amber is one of those VPP companies, that seem to take control over your system.
You are probably going to have to reach out to them for support I suspect.

Managed to get it working finally! Went into the inverter display settings and scrolled till I found that the max discharge amps from battery was set to zero! Changed it to 50 and all good.

Just one question. See image below… why would 270w be missing… numbers don’t add up from what solar is feeding to house and charging battery? That 23w is grid incoming which I can’t change.

Glad to hear you tamed the beast, I was not sure if your energy provider had full control of your system.

Your missing energy might be what your Inverter is using itself, or losses from converting DC to AC (for house load)

Thanks again. Appreciate all the advice

Hey Mate,

Thanks for the post. I had similar problem with my batteries the last few days being at 100% but they wont discharge and the house wouldnt run on the battery power, so it was importing from the grid instead I had also joined Amber and my app was in the finial stages of being ready to launch. I reckon the issues is with Amber playing around with things lol.

Anyway, like you suggested - Ive gone into the battery settings via the inverter and mine was also showing 0 amps discharge, ive changed it to 50 amps and everything seems to be working perfectly now.

Thanks for the heads up - hope this helps more Fox/Amber people in the same situation.

Thank you for posting, it will help others that find this thread to know the fix deen posted works.

Happy to help. I’ve told amber to cancel my smartshift registration. Seems to be causing more problems than anything and reviews haven’t been good either.

Just a quick addendum to this thread, a couple of Amber users have also reported that their system was having the Export Power Limit set to 1w (in Settings under Export Control).

If that happens, set it back to the correct value (usually your inverter size in watts or the agreed export limit)