Battery card colors explained — charging, discharging, and critical
The battery card on a plant’s Overview page and its homeowner-facing view uses three colors, and a fourth neutral state, to show what the battery is doing right now — at a glance, without reading the numbers.
The three states
Section titled “The three states”- Amber — discharging. The battery is supplying power to the home or grid.
- Green — charging. The battery is drawing in power, usually from solar surplus.
- Red — critical. The state of charge has fallen to, or below, this plant’s bailout floor — the point where an armed automation would step in to protect the battery. Red always wins over amber or green, even mid-discharge.
If the charge/discharge direction isn’t known (no recent battery-power reading), the card shows the percentage with no direction label — it doesn’t guess.
Where the red threshold comes from
Section titled “Where the red threshold comes from”There’s no fixed “20% is always critical” rule. The red threshold is this plant’s own bailout floor — the lowest state of charge any of its armed or rehearsing automations is set to protect. If a plant has no automations at all, the card falls back to a 20% floor as a sensible default.
If a plant has more than one automation guarding the battery at different floors, the card uses the highest one — because that’s the floor that would trigger first as the charge falls, so it’s the one worth calling “critical” for that plant. Armed automations outrank rehearsing ones: a rehearsal switches nothing, so its floor can’t redefine “critical” while a live one exists.
Why this matters when setting up an automation
Section titled “Why this matters when setting up an automation”Because the card’s red threshold tracks your automation’s bailout setting, changing a recipe’s bailout floor on the Automations tab changes when the Overview card turns red for that plant too. Both readings — the tile you glance at and the automation’s own safety trigger — always agree, because they read the same number.
Where to go from here
Section titled “Where to go from here”- Set up an automation with its own bailout floor: plant-automations-overview
- See where this card lives on the page: plant-overview-tab
- Who else sees this on the homeowner side: who-sees-monitoring-alerts