SolarEdge Home Battery Backup and you.

How owning a battery – especially the DC-coupled SolarEdge Home Battery - helps combat the higher costs of energy with TOU, dynamic rates or negative pricing, and gives you more energy. And together with the SolarEdge Home Backup Interface, you have a reliable home battery backup system that can extend backup time.

You may have heard that the beauty of SolarEdge products is that they are designed to work together as part of a comprehensive, cohesive, smart ecosystem, with intelligent, robust hardware enhanced by smart, money-saving software. It’s true. The SolarEdge Home ecosystem, orchestrated by SolarEdge ONE optimization system, is specifically crafted for homeowners to effortlessly produce the most energy as possible from their panels, store the most energy as possible – and use it most cost effectively. Effortlessly.

But when we get right down to it – what do we need all this for? How do storage and backup actually work day to day – and how does SolarEdge Home make that experience better? What do we mean when we say “storage” and why do we need it?

We produce our own solar energy, why do we need a battery?

Solar energy is a way to live more sustainably and produce the energy you need for your home. However, there is often limited correlation between when the energy is produced and when it is needed.

Solar energy production is at its peak at midday. In many families, no one is home at that time. While it is possible to set heavy appliances like dishwashers or washing machines to work during daylight hours, it is more than likely that a great deal of the solar energy that is produced isn’t needed during the day. In certain areas, the unused energy can be sold to the grid. However, legislation around the world differs: in some areas, selling energy to the grid at peak hours can be at lower rates, or penalized. This means that additional energy that you don’t use will be wasted or might cost you money.  In such cases, adding a battery can be valuable in helping you keep the energy you produce and use it in the most cost-effective way. This is especially true when the battery is orchestrated by an energy management system, like SolarEdge ONE, that makes automatic decisions to benefit a family’s energy use and pocketbook.

Batteries can offer even more added value: In the evening when the family is home, the system, of course, is no longer producing. But these are the hours that a great deal of energy is generally needed. While homeowners can of course purchase this energy, it will be sold to the homeowner at a premium cost in regions employing a time of use or dynamic tariff system. And in regions where it is possible to sell energy back to the grid, it will be more profitable to do so at the higher peak demand rates in the evening after storing the energy in the battery during the day.

Owning a battery, especially one that is part of an integrated system and orchestrated by a dedicated energy management system, can make a real difference.
 

Home battery backup that stores more

When you own a battery, especially a SolarEdge Home Battery, that battery not only gives you the freedom to use your own produced energy at night, but it actually can help you keep more of the energy you produce, which means more energy for you to use.  

DC-coupled batteries for the win

DC-coupled batteries are built in a way that enables more of the energy produced to be stored and used. How? A typical AC-coupled system requires three energy draining conversions before that energy can be used in the home. The energy from the sun is DC, while the home uses AC – so in order to use it you need to convert that energy. If the battery is AC, energy comes from the sun in DC – is converted to AC by the inverter to be stored in the battery. Then converted to DC again to go through the inverter to be sent to the home – when it will be converted, again, to AC. Confusing? Yes, and imagine how much energy you are losing at each of those three conversions!

Not so with the SolarEdge Home DC-coupled battery. Here, only one conversion is required, Exactly the same conversion made when the energy is produced and immediately used.

All this means – more energy for you.

Protection from outages.

You may think (as I did actually!) that as long as you have solar energy, grid outages can’t touch you. This is inaccurate, however. Most solar systems today are what we call grid tied. They are connected to the grid through the home main circuit breaker – and so, if the grid fails, the inverter also stops functioning, making it impossible to produce, use or store solar energy. HOWEVER, SolarEdge Home solves that with the SolarEdge Home Backup Interface. This little box disconnects the home from the grid and closes the connection to enable the inverter to continue to operate. The system is extremely flexible and is built to provide real support for real-life scenarios. For example, you can choose to back up your entire home or only specific essential devices. You also have multi-day backup, which means that if the grid is out for up to twenty days, you can still produce and store, which is not possible with most systems.

Energy Management at its finest.

You have this amazing system with all kinds of abilities. But how do you get the best benefit from it? How do you make sure that you are using battery energy when prices are high and grabbing energy from the grid to use AND to store during negative pricing? Or how do you make any number of decisions throughout the day to take best advantage of your system?

That’s where SolarEdge ONE comes in. It’s an energy optimization system that serves as your AI based personal energy assistant and makes the decisions in real-time that can ensure you have energy when you need it, while saving you money. Choose the battery mode that suits your lifestyle and SolarEdge ONE does the rest, using intelligent AI algorithms that take information from external sources like the weather and local rates, as well as your own usage patterns to design your daily plan and extend your backup duration*.

Subsidies

It’s a good idea to check out if subsidies and incentives are available from your local or national government to add batteries to a solar system. Various opportunities exist to reduce the investment needed to add storage to the ecosystem, since some governments are becoming more committed to reducing CO2  in their regions and understand the value of storage to achieving that aim.

Battery opens the door to more savings.

As you can see, the battery is the gateway to increased savings and increased solar energy usage around the home. With electricity costs and regulations becoming even more complicated, now is the time to install solar with storage – or, if you already have solar, add a DC coupled battery to your existing system. This added component can help you to make the most of your solar investment.  Choosing SolarEdge Home means you will have one scalable ecosystem to which you can easily add more panels or batteries or EV charging – or whatever you need, when you need it, with all the details baked in to ensure your day-to-day experience is effortless, effective – and genuinely cost saving for a home battery backup experience that you will enjoy.

Learn more about SolarEdge on our website. 
Installers, find out how to start working with us here. 
 

*Extend backup duration when you add the SolarEdge Home Load Controller to your system