Adding solar panels to your home can provide you with renewable energy every time the sun rises. It can significantly reduce your monthly electric bill, but if you don’t have a battery connected to the system, you’ll still be relying on the grid every night. If you want to further reduce your grid usage and improve your energy independence, adding solar panel battery storage can help you reach those goals. Keep reading to find out how to connect a solar battery to your current system.
Step 1: Pick a Battery
When it comes to solar batteries, you need to conduct a fair amount of research to find the right one for your system. This isn’t as simple as determining whether you need AA or AAA batteries for your child’s electronic toy. There are many different battery types with different chemical compositions, and each has its pros and cons. You need to conduct thorough research to find the best option for you, with the right balance of storage size, efficiency, and cost.
Once you’ve chosen the type of battery you want, you’ll also need to determine how many of them you want to buy. If you want a small amount of emergency backup power, a few batteries should do the trick. If you want to fully meet your energy needs every night, you’ll need a much larger battery bank that’s properly sized to meet those needs.
Step 2: Ensure You Have the Right Inverter
There are a few different types of solar inverters as well: grid-tied, hybrid, and off-grid. If you knew you would want to add solar batteries to your system eventually, hopefully you invested in a hybrid inverter for your system. If you have a grid-tied inverter, this type won’t offer the necessary connections to add a solar battery bank. You’ll need to replace your inverter with a hybrid model in order to make solar power storage a possibility for your system.
Step 3: Plug and Play
Once you have the right equipment for your system, attaching a battery to your solar panels is relatively easy. Your hybrid inverter will have an input option for connecting your battery bank. Depending on the style of bank you get, you may need to connect the batteries individually to each other. Keep in mind that individual batteries can be connected in different methods—in series or in parallel. Each of these has a different impact on your system, so be sure to reach the benefits of each connection type. Once you get your batteries connected to each other and your inverter, your solar panel battery will be able to start storing your excess solar panel right away.
