Faster Amber Electric pricing for Home Assistant and HAEO

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A Home Assistant custom integration for Amber Electric that provides faster real-time electricity pricing with smart polling and WebSocket support.

Features

• Simple Setup: Just like the official integration - enter your API key, select a site, and you're done
• Smart Polling: Adapts and learns when confirmed prices typically arrive and polls at those times to fetch latest prices as fast as possible
• Forecasting: Provides price forecasts for both import and feed-in channels for automations and optimizers
• Flexible Pricing: Choose between AEMO-based pricing (per_kwh) or Amber's predicted pricing (advanced_price_predicted)
• Waits for Confirmation: Holds previous prices until confirmed values arrive, with configurable timeout control
• Demand Window Pricing: Optionally add a surcharge during demand windows for optimization-focused automations
• WebSocket Support: Supports real-time updates via Amber's WebSocket API (alpha feature) as a redundant data source to polling
• HAEO Compatible: Forecast sensors are fully compatible with HAEO for energy optimization

Screenshots

Sensors	Diagnostics

Installation

HACS (Recommended)

Or manually:

1. Open HACS in Home Assistant
2. Click on "Integrations"
3. Click the three dots in the top right and select "Custom repositories"
4. Add this repository URL and select "Integration" as the category
5. Click "Install"
6. Restart Home Assistant

Manual Installation

1. Copy the custom_components/amber_express folder to your Home Assistant's custom_components directory
2. Restart Home Assistant

Configuration

1. Go to Settings > Devices & Services
2. Click Add Integration
3. Search for "Amber Express"
4. Enter your Amber API token (get one from Amber Developer Settings)
5. Select your site
6. Optionally configure the integration options

Options

Amber Express supports the following per-site options:

• Site name: Display name used for the Home Assistant device and entities
• Pricing mode: Choose the price field used by sensors
  • per_kwh: AEMO-based pricing (this is what the Amber App displays to users)
  • advanced_price_predicted: Amber advanced predicted pricing (this is what Amber SmartShift uses, and recommended for optimizers)
• Enable WebSocket: Enables Amber WebSocket updates as a secondary real-time data source
• Wait for confirmed prices: Enabled by default; holds previous interval price until confirmation
• Confirmation timeout (seconds): Maximum wait before publishing falling back to estimate price
• Forecast intervals: Number of future intervals returned by forecast sensors
• Demand Window Price ($/kWh): Adds a configurable surcharge to general channel prices during demand windows

Adding a demand window price helps optimizers such as HAEO avoid importing during the demand window.

HAEO Integration

The forecast sensors are designed to work seamlessly with HAEO. Simply add the forecast sensors to your HAEO Grid element configuration:

# Example: Use in HAEO
Import Price: sensor.amber_express_general_forecast
Export Price: sensor.amber_express_feed_in_forecast

Smart Polling

Amber Express learns when confirmed prices typically arrive and schedules its polling at the most likely times.

1. At the start of each 5-minute interval, polls to get the initial estimate price and forecast
2. Tracks when confirmed prices historically arrive and times subsequent polls accordingly
3. Stops polling once confirmed price is received

This adaptive approach typically delivers confirmed prices within seconds of publication.

Forecasting

Amber Express includes forecast attributes for both import and feed-in channels.

• Forecast length is configurable using the Forecast intervals option
• Forecast sensors update with each polling cycle and can be consumed directly by automations
• Forecast entities are designed to integrate easily with optimizers such as HAEO

WebSocket Support

The integration will (optionally) connect to Amber's WebSocket API for real-time push updates. This is an alpha feature from Amber and cannot be currently relied upon, so it is used in tandem, getting prices from whichever API is faster.

Comparison

Feature	Amber Express	amber2mqtt	Amber Electric
Polling	Adaptive (learns timing)	Scheduled (you configure)	Fixed 1-minute
Update Speed	Fastest	Fast	Slow
Waits for Confirm	Configurable	Always	No
WebSocket	Optional (alpha)	No	No
Environment	Native Integration	Addon + Requires MQTT	Native Integration

Credits

This integration is inspired by:

• Official Amber Electric Integration
• amber2mqtt by cabberley
• AmberWebSocket by cabberley

License

MIT License