How home battery storage works
When the sun is shining, solar panels on your roof are generating electricity, which is used to power your home. Without a battery, any excess electricity being generated is typically exported to the grid. With a battery, excess electricity is stored in your home solar battery system.
You can use stored energy later, saving you from importing power at night or on cloudy days. If your battery is empty, and your solar is not producing energy, grid power kicks in to supply your household.
Having a battery helps to lower the power you are using from the grid, which lowers your electricity bills.
So my name’s Tanguy Clarke. I'm an electrician and I install solar and battery systems.
It's very important where we put the battery. There’s certain requirements of where you can install a battery. We like to either go in a garage or on a wall that doesn't get too much sunlight.
Once you've chosen the location of the battery, we install the cabinet. We run all our cabling and then we continue to slide in our batteries, which is probably the easiest part of the job.
Once we have the cabinet in place, we slide in all our batteries. I'll show you how to do that now.
Once all the batteries are connected, we proceed to turn it on. To do that's a simple process.
Battery 1, battery 2.
It's going to brighten up the display screen. As you can see, all the batteries have started.
We then proceed to go to our inverter. So this cell inverter connects to the solar panels on your roof and turn that on.
Next, we come over to the side of our panel and we go with the startup procedure.
Right now, you'll be powering your house from the sun.
The role of solar inverters in home battery systems
Solar panels generate energy in the form of direct current (DC) electricity. Home battery systems store energy as DC electricity.
As most homes run on alternating current (AC) electricity, the DC electricity from solar panels or home batteries needs to be converted. Inverters are the mechanism that safely converts household electricity to AC.
There are 2 options for home inverters:
- A single hybrid inverter, which can convert both solar energy and battery energy.
- Separate inverters, with one converting solar energy and the other converting battery energy.
For households wanting to upgrade an existing solar system, having 2 dedicated inverters may be the simplest approach. If you’re installing a new solar system and are interested in adding a battery later, a hybrid inverter may be a good choice.
All systems require compliance checks, so it’s best to chat with your installer about what option is best for your household.
Charging a battery overnight
You can take advantage of off-peak electricity rates to charge your battery overnight if you’re on the relevant tariff and your battery has the right functionality and smart software. The functionality required for grid-charging does come at a cost. Battery systems that can be charged from the grid are typically more expensive than regular solar charging-only batteries.
The smart software may also allow you to coordinate charging your battery with weather forecasts. Smart systems can predict next-day solar generation levels. This will then adjust the level of pre-charging from the grid to ensure the battery is full before the evening peak, when energy is more expensive.
Off-grid power systems
Off-grid power systems, also known as standalone systems, are not connected to the main grid. Standalone power systems are an attractive option for those living in remote locations who do not have access to the electrical grid.
Batteries in these power systems are essential for storing and supplying a household with continuous electricity.
The batteries store surplus energy generated by solar panels during the day and release it when the sun isn’t shining, at night or on cloudy days.