“Home Batteries: The Future of Energy Consumption for Solar Panel Owners and Beyond”

In January 2022 we published an extensive background story about home batteries, a topic that is also very popular on the Tweakers forum. For owners of solar panels, it will become more important in the future to consume as much of their own electricity as possible instead of feeding it back into the grid, because the financially advantageous net metering scheme will be phased out between 2025 and 2031 and ultimately only a feed-in fee will remain. This is already the case in Belgium and since this year a capacity tariff has also been introduced whereby households are encouraged to remain within a certain bandwidth for both consumption and feed-in. A home battery can also be interesting for households without (many) solar panels, but with a dynamic energy supplier, because you can buy power at cheap times to use at expensive times, which also relieves the grid.

With a home battery you can store solar power during the day and use this power in the evening, when it is dark and the panels do not yield anything. This is especially convenient during winter evenings, because power consumption is relatively high between six and eight in the evening. This way you also know for sure that you are using green electricity instead of gray. Another advantage is that you become less dependent on the grid. Although power failures in the Netherlands and Belgium are fortunately rare, they do occur occasionally. If a malfunction occurs, you will not be left in the dark with a home battery (and hybrid inverter), while the rest of the neighborhood has to get the candles out. Solar panels alone do not help against power outages, because the inverter is connected to the grid. In addition, there is a protection that prevents the inverter from being overloaded, for example when it cannot get rid of the solar power.

In the forum Sustainable energy and installations there is a lot of discussion about dynamic prices, solar panels, inverters, chargers and home batteries. One of the most extensive topics there is Building a powerwall yourself. Since this topic was created in 2018, it has been viewed more than 300,000 times and received more than 2,300 responses. Since then, various tweakers have dared to build and use a home battery. We spoke to five of them about this: Jaszie, Pat-Juh, KC27, Domba and PCJR.