Do you need a solar battery?

A home battery stores solar energy for use at night or during an outage. It does two jobs:

• Backup power — keeps essential loads running when the grid goes down.
• Bill management — on time-of-use or low-export rate plans, it shifts solar energy to expensive hours instead of exporting it cheaply.

When a battery makes financial sense

• Your utility pays little for exported solar (low net-metering or net-billing).
• You're on a steep time-of-use rate.
• Outages are frequent or costly for your household (medical equipment, well pump, work-from-home).
• A state or utility storage incentive is available.

Sizing

For backup, add up the daily kWh of the loads you must keep running and multiply by the days of autonomy you want. The Battery Calculator does this from an appliance checklist. Most whole-home backup setups land at 1-3 battery units.

See solar battery cost, then get quotes for solar + storage.