That trade made sense when feed-in tariffs were generous. They are not any more, in most of the country. A battery keeps what your roof makes until you are home to use it, adds a circuit that survives an outage, and leaves the door open to a virtual power plant if you ever want it.
The one that does not: buying a battery because it feels like the complete version of solar. If you already use most of what you generate during the day, storage adds cost before it adds much return.
Your usage lands after sunset
If the house is empty until six and then everything switches on at once, an array without storage exports all day at a poor rate and buys it back at the worst one. Storage closes that gap. It is the single strongest reason to add a battery.
Outages actually matter to you
Medical equipment, a home business, a rural property at the end of a long line, or a freezer you cannot afford to lose. Standard solar shuts down in a blackout by law; a battery with a backup circuit does not.
You might join a virtual power plant
A VPP pays you for letting an operator dispatch your battery at peak times. It can improve the economics meaningfully. It also means giving up some control, and the terms differ a lot, so it is a decision worth making separately and later.
You expect to electrify further
A heat pump, induction cooking, a car. Each one moves more of your household onto electricity, which raises both the bill and the value of storing your own generation. Modular stacks let you add capacity without replacing what you have.
A backup circuit is not the whole house.
It carries the loads you nominate — typically the fridge, some lighting, the router and a few power points. It runs on what is in the battery plus whatever the array can make while the sun is up, so an outage on a grey afternoon is a shorter proposition than one on a clear morning.
And it has to be wired in at installation. Adding it later means bringing an electrician back to the switchboard, so decide before the design is finalised which loads you actually care about.
What we will ask you
- When the household actually uses power, on a normal weekday.
- What your current feed-in tariff is, and what your retailer charges after dark.
- Whether outages are common where you live, and what has to stay on when one happens.
- Whether a car, a heat pump or induction cooking is likely in the next few years.
- Whether you would want to join a virtual power plant, or would rather keep full control.
Send us a recent bill, or interval data if your meter has it. We model it against your household rather than an average one, and a quote that recommends waiting is still a useful quote.