Energize day and night
With the summer months ahead, you can turn the long sunny days into energy that powers your home or business 24/7. With solar paired with battery backup, you can ensure that clean, renewable energy powers your cool summer nights. Exercise your energy independence through renewable energy technologies like solar and battery. Read on to review the three pillars of our electricity relationship and what to consider when going ‘off-grid’ with your solar and battery storage systems.
Utilizing the three pillars of our electricity relationship
Energy independence begins by creating your electricity and being able to store it. Using the energy is easy, but it is vital to know how to use it to save money, avoid power outages and live a self-sufficient lifestyle.
Use
knowing how much energy you use is necessary to sizing an appropriate solar panel system. Understanding what appliances you use regularly is essential to sizing your battery back up needs.
Create
Solar Photovoltaic technology is as good as ever; now, you can install a higher capacity system with fewer modules and have a stunning array to show to the world!
Store
With a few battery options to choose from, you can have it your way with how much battery capacity you want to install to power your critical loads or the whole home!
When to use battery backup
Summertime is when we recommend people with a solar PV system paired with battery backup to use their stored energy at night. That is because, in the long sunny days of the summer, you can use the excess solar power to quickly recharge your batteries and carry on generating credits for use in the wintertime.
Battery Payback?
With a Time-of-Use rate only in areas where Pacific Power supplies your electricity, battery backup for the majority of Washington can’t provide homeowners a return on investment (ROI). Instead, they are a great alternative to noisy fossil-fueled generators with their clean, smooth, and transparent backup capability. Installing a battery backup system alone is an excellent investment in guaranteeing your home electricity during blackouts.
Net-metering and battery usage
The primary benefits of generating your electricity with solar panels come with net metering. Credit your excess energy to your utility provider, and then pulling these credits when you aren’t producing enough power to cover your usage is how you save money year-round! With net metering, the grid functions as a sort of ‘big battery’ that stores your energy. The caveat is that if you are using your credits from the grid, the energy mix still has fossil fuels, which means you are powering your home not solely from renewable energy sources.
Exercising energy control
By having your battery storage source at home or in your business, you can exercise the option of utilizing that energy to meet your electrical needs when the sun isn’t shining. In the morning the following day, once the solar panels are creating energy, you can recharge the battery and continue using the power you produce during the day.
Considerations of powering your home with your batteries
Maximize cycles within the warranty time frame
Lithium batteries used to backup homes are designed to discharge at intervals to preserve battery health. Using them periodically will help keep them healthy and simulate usage during grid outages. It is essential to see if any issues arise when relying on batteries as an energy source.
Avoid using the 'dirty' grid
As mentioned earlier, energy from the utility grid involves powering your home with fossil fuels sourced electricity. Generating solar power is a way of guaranteeing your home uses renewable energy. Energy storage allows you to use this energy at night, although this is not possible for everyone. Having enough battery capacity to power all the necessary appliances and loads at night may not be the goal of those seeking battery backup. It’s essential to understand your battery capacity, not to limit your lifestyle if you’re trying to go ‘off the grid.’
Get an understanding of your battery capacity
Using your battery at night is an excellent opportunity to become more familiar with your storage monitoring app, whether its Powerwall or Enphase IQ 10, both will give you battery state-of-charge monitoring and display energy production/consumption if you have solar paired with your battery system.
