What To Look For When Choosing A Solar Battery

Getting the right solar battery for your needs requires understanding your energy usage patterns as well as the various energy storage systems that you can use. There is a good reason to do this. Ideally, your solar energy system including the storage batteries should always match your energy usage patterns. Without this, you risk spending a lot of money on a solar energy system that will not deliver exactly what you want. When you are in the process of choosing a solar battery, here are some of the things that you need to consider.

When you are in the market for solar batteries, there are several parameters that you need to keep in mind. These are as follows:

Power Rating

The power rating parameter in solar batteries refers to the amount of energy that a battery can provide at the same time. This parameter is typically used to determine how many appliances your solar battery can run at the same time. Depending on the power rating, you can figure out which appliances to power and which ones not to, especially if the power rating of the battery is not very high. Different homes require different power rating figures and an energy audit will help you to map out power usage around your home easily.

Storage Capacity

As the name suggests, this parameter looks at how much power a battery is able to store and provide to your house at any given time. When looking at this, your solar battery retailer might also refer to usable storage capacity. This is a related unit of measure that looks at the amount of energy that you can effectively draw from the battery. This is because not all stored power is available for use and different types of batteries have different storage capacities. For example, lithium-ion batteries are able to discharge a lot more power relative to their total stored powers compared to lead-acid batteries.

Roundtrip Efficiency

This unit of measure looks at how efficiently the solar energy system (inverter and battery) is able to store electricity as well as their efficiency in converting it. This is because every time electricity is converted (from DC to AC for example), there is some loss of electricity in the process. This index measures the number of electricity units that you get out of your solar battery in relation to every unit of electricity that goes into the same battery.

Battery Lifecycle

This refers to the lifetime of the battery as measured by two main indexes. The first of these is the expected throughput which looks at the total amount of energy that one can expect to pass through the battery in its entire lifetime. Another unit of measure when it comes to the lifespan of your battery is the expected cycles. This in turn looks at the number of times you can expect to recharge and discharge your battery over its lifetime.

Besides the technical aspects of your battery, you must also consider factors such as the cost of the battery as well as that of installing it. Depending on the budget that you are working with, these two factors will also play a part in selecting the right battery for your needs.