How CATCH Control + Amber Electric help you make money while you Shower
- CATCH Power
- Jul 29
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 1
From off‑peak to real‑time pricing While many savvy solar owners are already taking advantage by using their surplus solar to heat their hot water throughout the day with CATCH Power others are left behind and are still heating their hot water from a flat tariff on off-peak. But Amber Electric are changing the game by exposing five‑minute wholesale prices instead of a fixed rate. By showing the actual price retailers pays on the National Electricity Market (NEM), you can time your consumption when energy is cheap or even negative. Keeping an eye on the wholesale price every five minutes would be madness, though, so automation is essential.

Let CATCH Control do the thinking CATCH Control brings together all your Consumer Energy Resources (CER); inverters, batteries, EV chargers, hot water systems, and pool pumps and makes them work as one. Each of these loads can be automatically controlled in line with wholesale market prices, solar exports, and your household needs, so they always run at the cheapest and smartest times. CATCH Control isn’t limited to just one load, inverter or battery, it’s designed to manage all the large loads of your entire home. High Adaptability
Because CATCH Power integrates with over 80% of inverters on the market, we can provide curtailment and export control across multiple brands on the same site. And if you’re running an inverter we’re not physically integrated with, the 6-Channel CATCH Control’s DRM output allows us to shut down any inverter on site when feed in tariffs ( FiT) go negative.
That means you’ll never be penalised for exporting energy at the wrong times, and your system stays compliant, flexible, and fully optimised.
CATCH Control ties it all together — monitoring prices, loads, and conditions in real time, and making the smartest decisions for you.
CATCH Control constantly monitors live prices, solar exports, and household conditions, then makes the smartest decisions for you — keeping your energy local, cheap, and efficient.
When to heat water
When to charge the car
when to charge/discharge the battery
when to curtail exports and even when to turn the inverter off completely.
This way you benefit from five‑minute pricing without lifting a finger.
Hot water: It's the battery you didn't know you already had.
CATCH Control treats your hot‑water tank like a thermal battery. Under normal conditions it heats the water with surplus solar, but when feed‑in tariffs spike it will delay heating to let you export more. Once prices stabilise, it tops up the tank so you never miss out on a hot shower.
But the real magic happens when prices go negative!
Occasionally, wholesale prices drop below zero. In these moments, CATCH Control goes beyond simply curtailing your solar—it will shut off the inverter, heat your water, charge the car and your battery - importing as much as possible from the grid. By loading up during these negative‑price events, your hot‑water and other loads become a revenue stream.
Later, when you shower, you’re using water heated by electricity you were paid to use, literally 'making money while you shower'.
Why CATCH Control + Amber makes sense It’s worth noting a key difference in how Amber and CATCH Control manage complex sites. Amber’s SmartShift software is built to manage a single inverter and battery on each premises, which means homeowners with multiple inverters often can’t optimise all their equipment through Amber alone. With CATCH Control if your site has several inverters (even from different brands), you can still participate in wholesale pricing by installing CATCH Control. The hardware acts as the energy meter and centralised control hub, allowing all inverters on site to operate under one export limit and respond independently to pricing signals. This makes CATCH Control an essential bridge for households with legacy string inverters, newer hybrid models or multiple solar arrays, ensuring the entire system is optimised together rather than leaving assets idle. A full list of integrations can be found here on our website Australia’s energy market is changing rapidly, and the combination of CATCH Control and Amber Electric gives homeowners the tools and flexibility to not only keep up but to profit from those changes. By turning your hot‑water system into a controllable load that responds to five‑minute price signals, you maximise solar self‑consumption, avoid high tariffs and even earn credit when the market pays you to use electricity. It’s a smart way to reduce bills, support the renewable transition and, yes, make money while you shower.
I have an Enphase micro-inverter on each solar panel. Can your Catch Power hardware handle that (I'd like to get a battery as well, but consumption is so high in winter - there is a catering business running at the premises, along with 2 air conditioners running virtually the whole of winter) ?