How Much Battery Storage Do I Need to Run My House?
Is your electricity bill stretching your budget thin each month? Or perhaps unexpected power outages are disrupting your life and causing headaches? Adopting battery systems for your house can cut down your electricity costs. It helps to save money by providing you with an electricity backup, depending less on the grid. Most importantly, it provides you with stored energy during power outages.
However, before deciding which battery you should choose, understanding the battery capacity and the factors that directly influence storage is important.
In this blog, we will discuss how much battery storage you need to run your house.
How much Battery Storage do you need?
The answer to the question of how much storage you need depends on many factors, such as energy consumption, battery size, and solar system size. Not all households require the same energy. If you pick a battery that stores less than your requirements, you will end up with no backup or partially running your home on solar. In the reverse case, you will store more energy than required, considering the fact that batteries with more capacity are expensive.
Understanding the requirements helps to make an informed decision.
6 Factors to Consider While Calculating Battery Storage You Need
Here are the important factors you should consider;
Energy Consumption
Running your home on a storage battery is directly related to your energy consumption. Calculator how many kilowatts you usually consume in a day. Various factors, such as location, family size, and household size, are important. For example, the average consumption for an Austrian household with two people per day is 8.71 kWh, while it increases to 21.355 kWh with four persons.
Your previous electricity bills can help you to get an estimation of your consumption. It is usually more during the peak winters and summers when you constantly use heaters or air conditioners. Like in Germany the average consumption is 32 Kwh per day in winters, while it rises up to 79 kWh/day in summer due to the air conditions and other appliances.
Peak Electricity Hours
The electricity you use does not always cost the same. Having an in-depth knowledge of peak hours and off-peak hours helps to get a better estimation of storage. Similarly, it helps calculate the peak consumption hours. During the day, you use the maximum amount of electricity, so you need to use the strained power accordingly.
For example, if your consumption during the night is more than during the day, you should avoid using the stored power unnecessarily during the day. Keeping is available for the night, which is your peak consumption hours, as the system won't be generating new energy at night.
Days of Autonomy
Your backup requirements also define your storage. To run a house on storage in an area where you have long sunlight hours is easy. But if you are in an area where the weather is mostly cloudy, you may need batteries with more capacity.
Whether you are opting partial backup or considering the whole home backup system, understanding this is important. Running the whole backup system will require many batteries and a lot of storage. While the partial backup can be fulfilled with less batteries.
Likewise using too many appliances at the same time may drain all the storage from the battery. You have to prioritize the consumption.
Battery Capacity/ Size
The batteries come in different sizes depending on their storage capacity. The battery capacity is its ability to store the power for later use. The larger capacity it has, the more power can be stored.
The capacity can be further divided into usable capacity and maximum capacity. The maximum capacity refers to the total energy it can hold.
The usable storage capacity is directly related to the capacity of your battery. For example, if your battery has a usable storage capacity of 20 kWh, That means you can use 5 kilowatts of power for 4 hrs. The Innotinum batteries provide the maximum storage options.
Solar Panel System Size
Batteries can be used alone to produce power, but with solar panels you can have excessive electricity. Since solar panels generate energy through the sun, you can always have better storage, depending very less on the grid.
However, the size of your solar panel is equally important. Both the batteries and solar panel size should support each other to store maximum energy. Installing a huge battery without calculating the capacity of your solar panel and aligning it with your requirements will result in unnecessary storage in some cases. In other words, you may have to depend on the grid to fulfill your power requirements.
To monitor the capacity of your solar panel along with the requirements and batteries you can install a monitoring system. Or you can go for a meter system. The metering system will help you understand how much energy your panel produces, and you can pick the batteries accordingly.
Calculating Battery Storage
Calculating the battery storage with solar energy also depends on your energy needs and consumption.
Below are the few elements you need to calculate how much storage you would need.
●Time (hours): Time per day you plan to depend on storage
●Electricity demand (kW): calculate the electricity demand depending on the persons
●Battery capacity (kWh): The average solar battery is 10 kilowatt-hours (kWh).
You can use the following basic formula:
Battery Storage Needed (kWh) = Average Daily Energy Usage (kWh) x Days of Autonomy
For example, if your household uses 30 kWh per day and you want two days of autonomy, you’ll need:
30 kWh/day x 2 days = 60 kWh of battery storage.
While all the factors mentioned above help you decide how much storage you will need. After calculating the battery quantity, invest in genuine products to get full value for your money. Innotinum provides premium quality, ensuring cutting-edge solutions meet your requirements. Contact us to get a quote and get rid of ridiculously expensive bills and embarrassing power outages.