If you’ve been researching different ways to make your home more energy-efficient, you may have come across the term solar battery storage. A battery is now a must-have if you want to maximise the amount of savings you make on your electricity bills from your solar panels. But what is solar battery storage and how does it work?
To ensure you’re up to speed on all the latest information, we’ve put together this short guide. It explains what domestic battery storage is, how it works and the benefits it could bring to you.
Why Do You Need a Solar Battery Storage System?
An energy-storage system also called home or solar battery, lets you capture electricity so you can use it at another time. Solar battery storage is a huge step toward energy independence. For example, you can store the electricity your solar panels generate during the day and use it at night. Pairing solar batteries with solar arrays is a relatively new practice, but an effective one. You can benefit from solar battery storage in 4 key ways:
- Store energy for later use
- Significantly lower your energy costs
- Earn money by selling stored energy to the grid
- Become independent from the grid
If you have solar PV panels or are planning to install them, then using home batteries to store the electricity you’ve generated will help you to maximise the amount of renewable energy you use.
Home-energy storage will also reduce the electricity you use from the grid, and cut your bill. If your home is off-grid, it can help to reduce your use of fossil fuel backup generators. In the near future, time-of-use tariffs will let you store up electricity while it’s cheap (overnight, for example) so you can use it during peak times.
Finally, by adding a solar panel battery to your solar system, you can choose to be independent of the national grid at any time. Thereby ensuring energy security for your household.
How does a Solar Battery System work?
Solar panels are only able to produce electricity when sunlight is present. This, therefore, creates an obvious issue when it’s dark and you still need energy for your home.
In this case, you would typically need to purchase electricity from the energy providers. However, when you use a battery storage system, you can easily avoid this problem.
When your solar panels generate electricity that you don’t need to use straight away, a battery will convert this DC electricity into AC power and store it, ready for later use. Essentially, your solar panels charge the battery when you don’t need to use the energy they’re producing.
Storage Capacity
The size or capacity of the storage system offered by SOLARWATT should be appropriate to meet residential consumption demand. In principle, the storage system should be large enough to supply a household with solar power all through the night.
A battery capacity of 4 to 8 kWh is usually sufficient for an average four-person home consuming around 4,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) annually
When is a good time to install a Solar Battery Storage System?
A solar battery storage system is best used in combination with a solar PV array. If you already have an existing array, it is a relatively simple task to add a solar battery into the mix. And if you have neither, the two systems can be bought in tandem to make your home run entirely on renewable energy.
The two technologies complement each other to bring down your storage system costs by making your solar panel array vastly more efficient. If you have been considering going green, there is no better time to start taking advantage of the money you can save on your monthly electricity bill.
Solar battery storage systems offer a variety of types of batteries for you to choose from, along with many advantages, like more eco-friendly efficiency, a longer lifespan, and easier installation.
