By installing solar panels, you can cut your monthly utility bills while also minimizing your environmental footprint. An essential part of setting up your system is finding the best solar batteries to store your power for use even when the sun isn’t shining.
Your home’s exposure to the sun’s rays is one factor that will determine the success of your solar power system. Additionally, an effective solar system requires the right panels, connected to the right battery.
Homeowners typically look for the best solar panels, but your battery is just as important. As such, it’s worth asking: What are the best solar batteries for use in your home?
Importance of a Solar Panel Battery Bank
Before assessing the best solar batteries, it’s important to clarify what makes batteries so significant.
How Solar Energy Storage Works
When you make the decision to go solar, you’ll have a series of solar panels installed on your roof. How solar panels work is that they collect energy from the sun and turn it into electricity. This electricity then passes through an inverter, which turns that raw electricity into a type of current that you can use to power your home.
Most home solar panel systems are connected to local power grid systems, which means that, if you ever produce more solar energy than your home needs, the excess is fed back into the grid. This typically results in a credit from your utility company. By contrast, if your solar system does not produce enough energy, you’ll draw energy from the grid.
Using a Solar Battery Bank
So where do batteries come into play? A solar battery bank will store energy that’s produced by your system, allowing you to use it later. So, if your system is creating a surplus of electrical energy, you can store it rather than feeding it back into the grid. Later, when your unit is not producing any energy (for instance, when after dark or on cloudy days), you can tap into those energy reserves in your solar battery bank.
The upshot is that, by having batteries for solar panels, you can have a backup power supply for times when the sun isn’t shining or for use during a localized power outage. However, you may want to consider a few of the best solar batteries before making a purchase for your home energy storage system.
5 Best Solar Batteries
As you juggle these different considerations and seek the best solar batteries for your system, here are a few specific products that earn our recommendation.
1) Sungrow SBP4K8
Initially developed by Samsung, the Sungrow SBP4K8 is one of the best lithium-ion batteries for in-home renewable energy systems. A few of its biggest selling points include:
With a retail price of roughly $4,000, it’s fairly affordable compared to some other types of batteries.
Thanks to its compact size and its convenient handles, this solar panel battery bank is easy to install or transport as needed.
Cable entry points create a quick and intuitive installation process.
It comes with a warranty of about 10 years and claims to offer somewhere around 6,000 cycles
2) BYD Battery-Box Premium HVM
BYD is a Chinese solar company, and its Premium battery is one of the best we’ve seen for solar power storage. Here are a few things we like about it:
This modular tower battery is available at a couple of different voltage levels so that you can choose the option best suited for your home energy needs.
It’s a cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate battery, which performs well at high temperatures and has a longer cycle life than lithium-ion batteries.
Battery modules can be stacked in order to increase the total capacity that’s available to you.
The BYD battery comes with a 10-year warranty and claims to be good for around 3,000 total cycles.
3) LG Chem RESU-10
The LG Chem RESU-10 lithium-ion battery was developed in South Korea and now stands as one of the most popular solar batteries in the entire world. Consider just a few of its primary selling points:
It’s sized at 9.8 kWh with 90% usable capacity, making it a real powerhouse.
The battery cells are layered in a unique pattern that helps prevent failure and maximize long-term reliability.
Independent testing and consumer reviews routinely tout this as a very consistent, high-quality solar battery.
It has a 10-year warranty and claims to have a battery life of 4,000 cycles.
4) Tesla Powerwall 2
Tesla isn’t just an automotive company; it also produces some of the best-reviewed, most technologically sophisticated solar products on the market today. The Tesla Powerwall 2 is one of the best solar batteries, and there are several reasons why:
While it’s a little pricey ($10,000 or so), it offers a usable capacity of 13.5 kWh, making it one of the most robust solar batteries you’ll find anywhere. As such, we think it demonstrates a fairly decent bang for your buck.
This is a full AC lithium-ion battery system, which means it has an inverter/converter already built in.
The AC system means it can be very easily retrofitted to any house with an existing solar panel installation.
Its compact design allows for some of the highest energy density on the market and many solar battery storage options for homeowners.
Read more: EcoWatch
