It’s evening time and the electricity price has increased to a high level. The solar panel system on your roof has stopped generating electricity some hours before, and without a battery your usage will be charged at the high evening rate.
Store Daytime Generation for Later
Solar panels produce most of their power during late morning and early afternoon, but the household evening peak is much later. So, instead of exporting surplus solar generation to the grid, it is far better to store it in a battery for later use. How much storage is required to power evening usage depends on the amount of power used by the household during evening hours. A typical home battery has a storage capacity of between 5 kWh and 15 kWh of which a significant proportion can be used for evening usage.
Use a Time-of-Use Tariff
And also, most time-of-use tariffs are set up so that you can top up your battery from the grid overnight at the lower off-peak rate, and then use the stored energy during the more expensive peak evening time. The amount of difference between the two rates can be anything from 10p to 20p per unit, and a battery will make use of that every day.
Schedule High-Draw Appliances Carefully
Higher usage appliances (dishwashers, washing machines and tumble dryers) each use between 1kWh and 3kWh per cycle. Running these appliances when your battery is full of energy or the solar panels are generating plenty of electricity in the afternoon means that your evening reserve of battery power will be stretched to light up your home, power your cooking and charge up your mobiles, etc. rather than being depleted by a wash cycle or two.
Watch Your State of Charge
Most battery apps or inverter displays will show you the current state of charge as a percentage. Take a look at your app or inverter display before the evening peak and you’ll be able to tell whether you have enough stored up to get you through to supper time and beyond, or whether you might need to draw a small amount of power from the grid early before the peak tariff kicks in.
Size Your Battery to Match Your Load
When sizing a solar battery storage system to run in the evening, Solar Battery Storage Cheltenham assessors base their recommendations on the homeowner’s evening consumption data. The amount of evening consumption will dictate how much of a battery a household needs. A household that uses 4kWh to 6kWh of electricity between 5pm and 10pm in the evening will require a different sized battery compared to a household that uses 10kWh of electricity in the evening. As with anything, oversizing will cost more than necessary and undersizing will mean that a homeowner is still paying peak-rate electricity every evening.
The main thing to get from a home battery is to match the amount of energy it stores to your actual evening usage. If you have a battery and expect it to do everything for you then you will probably find that it does not work as well as you hoped. For Solar Battery Storage Cheltenham see https://www.precisiongreenenergy.co.uk/renewables/solar-battery-storage/cheltenham/
