Unable to send lightning payment: insufficient_balance

Hey,

I’m trying to send a lightning payment to Bluewallet through my umbrel lightning node but I just get the error message: Unable to send lightning payment: insufficient_balance.

I have sufficient balance.
I have opened a channel already.
Bitcoin core is fully synced.

Anyone that can help?

Thanks,

Did you read this guide?

It’s solved, but thanks anyway :slight_smile:

Hi Maria. I’m having the same issue. How did you resolve it? Thanks

You need to balance your lightning channel. Not all the sats can be on the other side. For example, I had only 1000 and the one who opened a channel to me had a lot more. So he sent me 10 000 sats, and then I was able to send lightning payments.

Hope it helps :slight_smile:

Thanks for your help Maria. I’m very new to this but enjoying the learning process immensely. I was able to send a payment from my muun wallet to my lightning node just fine. The trouble is when I try to send a payment from the node back to muun wallet. On Umbrel it says “max send 30,500 sats” so it seems like the channel is funded but I still get the “insufficient_balance” error.

Perhaps I can only send funds from my node to another lightning node? Was hoping to use my node to send friends small transactions to their lightning wallets put perhaps they also need to be running nodes for this to work?

Appreciate your help.

Hi!

You should be able to send transactions to an app wallet. I have sent sats from my lightning node to BlueWallet, and they don’t have to run a node. I think it also depends on what amount there is on “max receive”, so it is balanced.
I am also quite new to this so maybe someone else on here can answer this properly?

Thanks for all your help Maria. With some experimenting I’ve been able to get things working now.