We’re all looking for ways to save on money and stress when it comes to the daily running of our home.
We’re all looking for ways to save on money and stress when it comes to the daily running of our home. Electricity is often one of the biggest utility bills you’ll find in your inbox, and with items like ovens, washing machines, and even your kettle using as much as 3.0 kWh/h, it’s easy to see that you’ll find yourself with a pricey bill.
Residential battery storage is one of the key new features you can add to your home, saving money and reaping in a heap of other benefits at the same time. Solar panels are becoming more common across new and older builds of homes as people want to save money on power while also helping the planet. But if you have a few cloudy days without sun, you’re going to soon find that you either have no power from your solar, or you’re backed up to the grid and this was your only option to keep the lights on.
There’s now a newer and more convenient alternative to solar grid panels in the installation of advanced batteries. These can be charged with extra sun power and used when the weather isn’t so good. There are a lot of benefits to using battery instead of grid backup; this article will run through just a few.
1. Maximise consumption of your own power
In a traditional solar power setup, you’d normally have the solar panels on your roof and your home backed up to the grid. This means that if you’re not producing enough energy from your own solar panels, you’ll still have power fed to your home from the grid. On the other hand, if you make more power than you consume, you’ll generally be able to sell the excess back to the grid, meaning your electricity bills will sometimes be credited or discounted. However these fees in selling back to the grid have changed quite substantially over the years and can change at any time. Depending on your location, you may find the sell-back rate varies from another area, which doesn’t seem fair at all. It’s the same sun after all, isn’t it?
Residential battery storage means that you can control and store all of your excess power. If you have a solar panel system that’s giving you more power than what you need to use, you can use these batteries to store power instead of selling it back to the grid. That way you can use the power from these batteries when you have bad weather or little sunshine. Having a battery backup essentially means you have a lot more control of how you use the power that your home is producing.
2. Keep your home’s electricity resilient
This is especially useful if you live in an area where your local grid power can sometimes be unstable, or if your area has encountered natural conditions that have left the power down for a few hours or days. Food will go off if you don’t have sufficient cooling coming from your fridge, and of course you’re left with a very inconvenient wait while your power supply is back up and running.
If you have solar panels you may be able to survive until your power runs out and the grid takes over. However if the grid is down then you’re left with no power once again. Having the battery back up means that in a time when all power isn’t working or available, as long as there is power left in your batteries you can continue using your home’s electricity.
3. Get power even with no grid connection
There are some areas in rural Australia where there may not be access to a grid connection. This would also be true if you’re on a rural property and the costs involved to be connected to the grid are far out of reach. Having the option to have your own solar panels and battery back up means you never have to rely on a connection back to the grid for your energy source. You can sufficiently create your own power and backup your excess usage, ready for when you have no sun power.
4. Reduce your carbon footprint
Removing your home completely off the grid and making it self-sufficient is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint. It used to be seen that ‘being green’ was not a reliable way of making your way through your day, especially if it came to energy sources. Newer technologies and tried and tested products have now meant that greener options like the battery backup system to your solar power are both earth-friendly while still being reliable.
5. No noise pollution
Solar panels and their batteries offer no noise pollution. Some homeowners who have a generator backup will understand the noise that can be emitted from some of these , which of course can make for a very unhappy neighbour. If the power goes out and you have yourself a solar system with battery backup, however, your neighbours aren’t going to hear a thing. Not only will you have your own power but you also won’t have an upset neighbour who’s tired of hearing and seeing that you have your lights on when they don’t!
6. Save on your electricity costs
It goes without saying that if you opt in to install a solar power system to your home with battery backup, you’re going to save quite a bit of money on your electricity costs. Instead of paying the fees that the electricity retailers want to charge you, you can be self sufficient with your electricity generation and save hundreds, even thousands of dollars a year on your electricity bills.
7. Affordable to install
Believe it or not, it’s actually an affordable option to get solar systems installed into your home. While there have been government incentives in the past to install a solar system, nowadays the costs involved to install a system is outweighed by the amount of savings each year on your electricity costs. You may be surprised at how much it will cost to get your own solar power system for your home.
Learn more about Endeavour Homes’ energy system here.
