10 Things You Need To Know Before Getting Home Battery Storage Installed 🔋

so you want to get battery storage installed but you don't know where to start well youve found the right video because today we're going to teach you 10 things you need to know before you get battery storage installed we're going to take you to three real life installs that we've recently completed and answer all the questions that you might have before you're getting batteries fitted and we're also going to show you all the questions that installers might want to ask before you get your quote this first install is a my energy Libby install then we're going to take you to a Tesla power wall install and finally a give energy all-in-one battery install to show you the full range of products and their different features and how each product might fit with your needs but the first thing you need to know before you get batteries installed is why why do you want a battery storage system normally there are a few reasons maybe you've got solar panels already but you want to store some of that excess solar energy that you're generating in a battery so that you can cover some of your overnight usage with the battery storage having harnessed some of that solar energy from your roof or maybe you don't have solar at all but you're looking to leverage cheap overnight tariffs or use clever Magic by means of software to reduce your overall energy costs by leveraging Cheap overnight tariffs exporting to the Grid at more expensive times and overall reducing your average cost of energy or maybe backup power is important to you either having emergency power circuits or whole house back up to keep your house going in the event of a grid outage whichever of those options applies to you the next steps will be slightly different if you got solar already then we're going to need to know about your existing solar system how big is the solar array how much energy are you currently exporting to the grid that margin of energy is what you can potentially harness and store in a battery during the day and then run your house overnight but we also need to think think about how much energy do you use overnight and that will tell us how much power you need to be able to store in a battery to cover your overnight usage with Battery Technology really coming of age now there are so many things you can do with batteries that make sense in order to reduce your carbon footprint and reduce your overall energy costs but it's knowing what you need from a system and how you're going to use the system and bringing that together will help us to design the right system for you so do you have your smart meter data that is a crucial question if you don't have a smart meter and you want batteries you're going to need to get one installed so head over to your relevant energy suppliers website and apply for a smart meter I know some people are scared about people knowing how much energy they use but it's really impossible to leverage the benefits of a battery storage system if you don't have a smart meter so the first of our three systems here is the my energy Libby system system my energy ecosystem is a great one because it combines EV charging solar hot water diverters and battery storage to enable you to monitor all of your energy usage and use these devices to reduce your Reliance on the grid and make the best use of your solar energy each my energy Libby battery module is rated at 5 kwatt hours but it has a 10% uh margin with the charge and discharge so you've got 4.6 kwhs of usable capacity per module so in this case we've got 4.6 9.2 13.8 and 18.4 kilowatt hours of storage that's the maximum that you can have with this system so it's quite a large system and with a 5 KW inverter your maximum charge and discharge rate is 5 KW which is pretty decent now this system is ideal for two situations one you've already got the my energy zappy charger for example which is an eco car char charger that allows you to charge your car from excess solar on your roof if you've already got the my ecosystem in your house with either a zap here or an Eddie or both and it makes sense to add a Libby to the mix if you want to store some of that solar energy you can also benefit from using smart tariffs to force charge and discharge the battery at certain times and make use of Cheaper energy overnight or make use of smart tariffs flexible tariffs or special discharge schem genes one thing that this system doesn't have which differs from some of the batteries that we'll look at later in the video is whole housee backup now there are backup circuits that you can run from this but the output is fairly small so you're not going to be able to run your whole house off the backup of this but you can install a separate backup consumer unit if you want with a couple of backup circuits that might be important to you however if whole home backup is for you then stay tuned for the next places we're going when you'll see that featured now one of the biggest benefit bits of installing battery storage is to store energy that you're already generating from an existing solar array now this is a huge example your system doesn't need to be this big but here we've got a massive 35 KW system in a ground Mount array and the customer was exporting loads of power during the summer and even on some days in Winter we got his energy usage readings and if you've got an existing my Energy System you can actually use the data that you've been building up from the zappy cuz it collects how much energy you use throughout the day use that data to know how much energy you use overnight when the sun's not shining and size the battery system accordingly and in this case we sized a huge battery storage system and it's still not quite big enough but for you you might find that a 10 15 or 20 kW hour battery storage system will be enough to store excess energy that you would normally be exporting to the grid and then run your house overnight with that free solar energy now all of the battery storage systems that we're going to talk about in this video today are what we call AC coupled they've been installed after the solar and the solar panels are not directly feeding into the batteries however you can get DC coule Systems from various Brands and if you're installing solar and batteries at the same time often a DC couple system is a good way to go in this particular situation we've got a solar Edge system we've actually got two inverters on this system three-phase inverters and they're doing the solar power generation and then the my energy system is reading how much solar is being produced and how much is being exported to the grid and then it's kicking in to charge those batteries rather than exporting that power out to the grid and potentially not being paid anything for it another thing you need to think about when getting battery storage installed is do you have or you thinking about getting an electric vehicle if you've got an EV already you've probably got a home charger and your installer will want to know what home charger it is to see whether it will integrate well with the battery storage system that they're suggesting or not obviously if you've already got a zappy then it's a no-brainer and it's quite easy to just install a battery system that will work with the zappy but you might have an older charger that's not a smart charger and it might be time to upgrade it to a smart charger just to get the whole system talking to each other nicely now all the battery storage systems that we mention in today's video do provide Prov their own EV charger that works seamlessly with their battery system so you can usually find a system where there will be all the devices that you need and they will talk together and that's important because what you don't want is to plug your car in and it drains the battery because the battery in your electric vehicle might be 70 kwatt hours or something like that the battery on your wall might be 10 15 or 20 So within a couple of hours you'll have dumped all the power from your wall battery into your car battery there'll be nothing left in your wo battery to run your house overnight and it kind of defeats the purpose so it's really good and important to have an EV charger that will seamlessly integrate with your battery storage system they'll work together in harmony now one thing you'll start to realize as you do your research is that most good battery storage systems are wool mounted and they need a decent amount of wool space in order to fit all the equipment neatly and have access to it for maintenance and changing settings Etc so behind me is a good example of that we've got a wall space that's about 2 m wide by 2 and 1/2 M high and it gives us plenty of space to mount all the equipment neatly and give access to everything you don't want stuff to be crammed in and difficult to access for installers or maintenance purposes for example you need to leave a certain amount of clearance above because these often cool by convection which means that the heat will be rising from the inverter up and through the back and you need to leave enough space for that heat to dissipate you don't want any kind of flammable materials close to the top of the inverter and you want the heat to be able to dissipate so that it cools itself properly now you might notice that there are multiple my energy systems in this property that's cuz he's got a three-phase supply so he fitted one on each phase however one of the nice advantages about the my energy system is that it is stackable and expandable which is slightly different to maybe some other battery storage systems out there you can start with a smaller system like a 5 or 10 kwatt hour and then if you find that over time you read the data and you see that you could do with a bit more storage you can easily add a couple more modules later and when we do an installation we always tend to leave enough blank wool space to add and do an upgrade later on by adding the second stack of batteries the my energy inverters are actually hybrid inverters as well so you could connect solar PV directly into it and have this as like a onstop system that does solar and battery storage we tend to often fit solar Edge systems which have their own separate inverters and optimizers and just use these as AC couple batteries but the option is there to do both and we have fitted a hybrid system where we connected the PV into this directly I'll leave a video link for that up here now one thing I've just noticed in the stats on our YouTube videos is that 78% of you who watch our videos regularly have not subscribed and that just doesn't make makes sense because we put out a plethora of amazing videos about renewable energy technology and we show you real life installations not just mounting everything up in a studio setting so if you'd like to subscribe it helps our Channel but it'll also help you because there's tons of educational content here on the channel over 600 videos in fact at this very property itself we've made several videos about all the different upgrades that we've done here over the years so why not settle back off after this video and watch all the other stuff that we've done at this property including upgrading the solar panels on that solar array to bigger more powerful ones we really appreciate it when you like And subscribe now as installers we have a lot of questions to ask customers in order to be able to provide an accurate quote and so many bits of information pictures and videos that we found ourselves asking customers for in the past and sometimes it would take a while to gather all of that information and from customers it could be tricky trying to provide that information when you're busy you're not always around during the day when you're installer's phoning you up and trying to talk you through these questions or maybe you're not even around during the week when the installer wants to do a site visit so we've developed open quote and it's an online system that enables customers to provide all the information that we need it asks simple questions and asks for photos and videos of some of the things that we've talked about today in order to create a job sheet for us us as an installer to have a beautiful overview of what you need as a customer if you're an installer and this kind of thing sounds like it's of interest to you I'll leave a link below where you can check out open quote maybe it'll help your business like it's helped mine so if whole house backup is important to you then a Tesla power wall is often a good option here at this property we installed a Tesla power wall with the Gateway here behind me and a battery on the outside which I'll show you in a bit the great thing about the Tesla power wall system is it does provide whole home backup so I'll talk you through the backup Gateway and how it works so this beautiful white box next to me is the Tesla backup Gateway it's basically the brain that handles all the clever stuff when you lose power from the grid to switch you over to backup power from your battery so there's a little switch on the side that opens the flap at the front and then inside the casing you've got a line of circuit breakers which do various things there's an incoming 100 amp fuse that protects the whole back Gateway and the cabling in your house and then you've got a non-b backup side and a backup side and the Tesla power wall itself has to be fed from the backup side of the Tesla backup Gateway the Tesla system can't handle more than a 5 kilowatt uh output when it's on backup mode so that what that means is that if you've got any heavy loading circuits for example a cooker you may need to install those on the nonb backup side so that in the event of a power cup if the cooker is running it will turn off but all of the other essential loads in the house that aren't so heavy as to shut the Tesla power wall down will continue if you had the cooker on and other heavy loads when the Tesla power Wall Kicks into backup mode what it will do is it'll kind of panic because there's too much load and then it will shut down anyway and you kind of lose the functionality of that backup power now interestingly if you have more than one power wall the output capability is more so in this property we've got one but if you had two you'd have double that output capacity so you could have 10 KW of output in the event of a power cup which is really handy sometimes so we got two main switches here one for the backup side one from the non-b backup side and underneath this cover is all the clever stuff so I'll take this off and show you inside the Tesla power wall needs to be installed so as to interrupt the main Tails coming into the main house consumer unit in which case this and this property we've done a full upgrade we've changed the main consumer unit to a larger one with better protection done a full eicr in the house as well to make sure that the existing wiring is safe I'll talk to you a bit more about that later but right now what we've got is the meter boxes on the other side of this wall and the main Tails from that electricity meter come into this fuse and through into the Main's incoming side of the Tesla gateway then out of there you've got a non-b backup side which comes into this main switch here so we've got basically a permanent feed live and neutral comes into this main switch and any heavy loading circuits like we mentioned like the cooker they go on the non-b backup side here so you can have up to three circuits you can probably fit on the non-b backup side and then out of the other side of the Gateway here you've got a live and neutral backup mode they come through and into this main switch here from the backup neutral live Terminals and then you've also got the outgoing Tails so the outgoing live and neutral tails that come through from the back upside into this main consumer unit and it means that everything in this consumer unit is going to stay live in the event of a power cut so how does the Tesla backup Gateway work in the event of a grid outage well within milliseconds it detects a loss of grid power and switches over cuts off the connection to the grid and the Tesla power wall battery starts to feed back into the house to run all of the circuits that are running off the backup side of the Tesla Gateway now it is EPS not ups that means imer mergency power supply rather than uninterrupted power supply that's a technical term to basically say that the power supply will flicker for a very small insignificant amount of time but it could interrupt certain electronic devices meaning that you're not going to have a completely uninterrupted power supply but as I said it's within milliseconds so you may or may not even notice the light bulbs flickering when power resumes the Tesla Gateway automatically switches back over to grid power and again you barely notice it but you can monitor it all in the app and see what's happening now there's another thing that's really clever about the Tesla power wall system is that it has the ability to communicate with your solar inverter in the event of grid outage and basically keep the frequency the same so that your solar inverter will keep running because it thinks that there's still a grid connection that means that effectively if it's a sunny day but the power cuts off from the grid you're so inverter which usually they're grid tied and they'll shut down in the event of a grid outage the solar inverter will actually keep running and keep powering your house with solar energy so that energy combined with a power wall can give you an even greater output and avoid that annoying thing of losing your solar power during a grid outage now if you'd like to see the whole story of this particular install we filmed the whole eicr process you can watch that video up here and see the steps that we took to get from where we were to where we are today now in order to install backup power of any type we also need a backup Earth so I'll show you how that works outside as well as showing you the power wall itself so essential part of a backup power system is an earth electrode this can be installed by way of an earth Rod disc or mat now we tend to use a conu disc as standard in most situations it's a round disc that you bury about 6 to 900 mil deep in the ground and ours is right below my feet here the coni disc goes in the ground and it creates a really good source of Earth so that if your house is on uh a supply where there is an external Earth provided by the supplier and you lose that Supply your house has a backup Earth which means everything operates safely in backup mode that earthing disc is wired into the main Earth terminal here in the meter box so in this particular case we've run the Earth cable from the conu disc up here and a bit of flex will conduit it neatly through into the meter box and into the main earthing terminal here then from there our main Earth to our consumer unit and Tesla Gateway runs now as part of the survey for a battery storage install one thing we're going to want to see is a photo of your meter box and also what size your main cutout for use is because we'll need to carry out an application to apply to connect the system to the grid another thing that we find is really important is the installation of a surge protection device it's now a requirement in the regulations that if your house has got expensive electronic devices in you should have a surge protection device which basically protects your electronics in the event of a power surge from either the local Grid or maybe lightning strikes in a local area not every installer is going to include one of those in your quote so if you are getting a quote I'd always advise to check whether they've included search protection as part of your package some installers might say that it's not necessary but the reg say you need to have a written risk assess M proving that you don't need one or you just need to fit one of course an essential part of installing a Tesla power wall is getting a cable to it from the consumer unit or backup Gateway we usually wire them from the Gateway as standard but if you got multiple power walls you might need a separate consumer unit where all the power walls are Wired from in this case we've run our cable for our power wall through the wall from the backup Gateway along up the external wall through the Loft and out and down on the other side of the house and we've used a very special cable which I'll talk to you about over at the power wall so here at the Tesla power wall there's a few interesting things to talk about that not everyone might tell you the power wall as I said can go inside or outside and it can work from minus 20° up to+ 50° C so operating temperature no problem when it's outside here in Britain we don't get very cold Winters anyway of course the ideal operating temperatures between about zero 30° so the cold will affect it but it's not going to ruin it or anything like that is designed and you see them fitted in America in the ice cold Winters and they work absolutely fine but this is what people might not tell you about this is an isolator switch and it's a safety requirement for a power wall now you might see on the Tesla website they just look like you know this this beautiful white block they don't show you the isolator switch it doesn't look the prettiest shall we say however it's an important safety requirement to be able to isolate it in in case of an emergency or for maintenance so if I'm working on this as an engineer I need to be able to safely isolate it lock it off and that's an important requirement so just know when you're having a power wall installed you will need an isolator switch uh next to it so there'll need to be a little bit more space or if it's installed right near the consumer unit then the consumer unit can have the isolator switch in it but it's got to be within about 3 m but let me tell you about this cable so we've come down from The Loft down in the corner and up into here now this is special cable it's not just standard steel or armored it's actually what's called Power wall connect cable it's manufactured by Doncaster cables and it has not only the power cables within it but it has multiple data cables too you can get all of the cabling for the Tesla power wall in One neat cable that for us is a great thing because it saves us time not having to pull several cables but it's also a lot neater to have one cable going to your power wall instead of three is a much neater solution and it means we don't have to run it in conduit or anything like that it's just a nice little bit of icing on the cake so let's do a rundown of the specs of this Tesla power wall battery so it has a 5 kilowatt charge and discharge rate that means that you can charge it up from the Grid or from solar at a rate of 5 Kow which means that within 1 hour it will have filled up 5 Kow of capacity within 2 hours it will have filled up 10 Kow of capacity and then the final 3 and 1/2 Kow well you can work out how long that would take it also discharges at a 5 kilowatt rate too so if you got 5 kows running in your house uh overnight and the batter is full all of that 5 Kow of energy is going to be coming from your Tesla power wall which is great now it does have a little trick within it where it can ramp up to seven for a few seconds if you've got a little spike in your supply but the continuous output isine KW now the maximum storage capacity of this battery is 14 KW hours however the usable capacity is 13 1 12 kwatt hours so that's what it's going to be sold as it's a 13 1 12 kilowatt battery basically with 100% charge and discharge rate so that is a very decent amount of capacity and I'll talk to you about how do you know what size battery you want in a few moments you can stack up to three power walls with a stacking kit so you could have 13 1/2 27 or 40 1/2 kwatt hours in a fairly small space and as you can see it looks pretty Sleek so having it on the outside of your house or even on the inside some people like to have them as a showpiece in the hallway or something like that I would never recommend putting a battery in the hallway uh or any kind of fire escape although they are very safe still think it's not a great idea to have it in a hallway but you can have it on the outside which is a great idea or on the inside of a garage or in a room that is not an occupied room they can make a little bit of noise sometimes so that's something to be aware of that you might not want it right next to your bedroom um but at the moment it's not making any noise at all it's quite quiet now the power wall two does need to be mounted with a bit of clearance around it it needs a 50 mil clearance on the top and on the left hand side and 150 mil clearance on this side that's cuz there's a fan here which blows the hot air out to keep it cool so you need a bit of extra clearance on the right hand side than you do on the left so that's an overview of the Tesla power wall let's head to our next site where we installed a different battery so we're here at our next property where we installed a give energy battery let me show you inside of course in true British style it's chucking it down with rain and hail so excuse the background noise but we're here at this give energy all-in-one battery system that we installed recently it's similar to the Tesla in a lot of ways but different too so let me explain so like the Tesla power wall we got a backup Gateway however in this installation the backup gate weighs remote from the main meter and consumer unit here we have the give energy all-in-one battery and this is a similar capacity to the Tesla one it's 13 1/2 kwatt hours with a 5 KW charge and discharge rate now like the Tesla because we've got backup power we've installed a backup Earth via a coni disc outside the back of this shed but you'll notice the location where we've installed this is a little bit different the gear energy all-in-one can be installed outside but if you do you need to put some kind of canopy over it to stop rain going directly in the top because it does have an opening in the top the backup Gateway can go outside too if needed but again like all electrical equipment i' probably recommend that if you can fit it inside fit it inside because no matter how weatherproof it is built the elements are certainly going to take their toll now something you need to bear in mind when choosing the size of battery that you want when you want whole house backup is how many power Cuts do you get and how long do those power Cuts generally last the interesting stat that we've just got from our customer here is that since we've installed this he's had three power Cuts two of them were quite brief only lasting a few minutes but one of them was actually 7 hours long and this battery was able to run his house for 7 hours and keep him powered during the power cup now whether your battery will allow you to run your house for 7 hours or more depends on two things it depends on the capacity of the battery that you install and how much power you use in the house if you wanted to run your house for 24 hours for example from battery storage in backup mode all you need to do is choose the number of kilowatt hours of battery storage that will be sufficient to run your house for that 24-hour period and in general you can do that by looking at your smart meter data finding out how much power you use on average in a 24-hour period and then sizing the battery storage system according ly now another thing that people often forget about when installing battery storage is that these systems need an internet connection all of them have apps that allow you to remotely monitor the system to see how it's working and even to change settings to be able to program it to charge and discharge at certain times for example you can charge the battery up on cheap electricity over the night and you can do that by setting a schedule for the battery to charge and discharge or even sinking it with some of your smart tffs from providing is like octopus energy but in order to make sure that all of that functionality is stable you will need a good internet connection which can happen either via Wi-Fi or via hardwired Ethernet hardwired ethernet is always the best option but it can be a more costly option because it involves running in more cables Etc so it's something to think about and talk to your installer to see what's the best situation for you in this particular install we've fitted solar PV on the roof as well and we've run the solar TV circuit into the give energy Gateway and that is off its own AC isolator here and this is the generation meter which shows how much energy the customer has generated since we installed the system like the Tesla power wall the give energy Gateway has circuit breakers in it too one for the all-in-one battery one for your PV inverter if you've got solar with it there's also a slot here for the energy meter and potentially for an EV charger in the future like I said at the Tesla install the EV charger circuit needs to go on the non-b backup side of the Gateway because an EV charger pulls 7 Kow which is more than the maximum output of the battery system what you really want in a power cut situation is for the EV charger to stop but everything else in the house to carry on running now there are certain advantages and disadvantages with this compared to the Tesla power wall one advantage is that this is a modular battery system actually has four battery modules that slot into it almost like suitcases and it means for an installer it's slightly easier to assemble than the super heavy Tesla power wall one disadvantage of this system versus the Tesla at the time of filming this video is that this is not stackable the maximum capacity that you can have for one system is 132 Kow however they are talking about potentially with a software upgrade enabling you to add more battery units later as I said earlier the Tesla power wall is stackable and you can stack multiple power walls in one system which is an advantage if you're looking for a bigger battery storage system so quick low down on the specs of this give energy Allin One battery it's a 13 1/2 KW hour system with 100% charge and discharge very similar to the Tesla power wall it has a 6 KW maximum charge and discharge rate which is slightly higher than the Tesla power wall and it does peak up to 7.2 KW for 30 seconds if you do get some spikes other than that it's very similar to the Tesla power wall in a lot of ways it looks slightly different it's slightly different in the dimensions but overall the two systems are quite similar but there are a few things that set all of these systems apart so let's talk about that so I'm here in the waltzer and if you don't mind to indulge me for a moment I want to have a little bit of a nerding out session with you because all of these systems have amazing functions and features when it comes to their apps and software and that is what sets each system apart each brand has their own ecosystem with an app that has different functionality although a lot of them are similar but different visuals and different sets of programs that you can use to really get the most out of your battery and our customer here has just been telling me about some amazing things that he's been doing with his battery just in the last 6 weeks since he's had it installed for example during the day when the sun is shining he can run his 9 KW electric shower without pulling any power from the grid and that's because here we've installed an AC coupled battery system with a separate solar inverter so he could be generating 4.2 Kow of solar coming through his inverter in The Loft and he could be outputting up to 6 Kow of power from the battery for a total of 10.2 KW of power without pulling anything from the grid that's one advantage of an AC coupled system but then when it comes to software then we get to the next level because with the app and dashboard that come with these kind of systems you can get involved in all kinds of exciting programs with the smart grid being fully underway things like demand flexibility schemes can have a massive impact on the benefit that you get from having a home battery for example National Grid have their w a Plugin app and it tells you which time of the day to plug in to make the best use of renewable energy from the grid but then there's other things like for example give Energy's give back scheme my customer here told me that he got paid about 10 for a recent 2hour session where he basically charged his battery up at about 4:00 in the afternoon and then dumped all the power out to the grid between 6 and 8 and he got paid £150 per kilowatt hour for exporting that power to the grid so imagine the scenario where you do this and you get paid for using electricity well that is a real situation that now happens for many customers the reason is that during peaks in demand from the grid the National Grid have to turn on pea plants burning coal for example which is horrible for the environment and of course very expensive so they want to avoid doing that and how better to do that than by using the power that's stored in your home battery to push out to the grid to help the grid to cope with those peaks in demand so as individual homeowners and users who have batteries we can actually help contribute to help with those peaks in Grid demand and reduce the Reliance on the grid of heavily polluting coal power plants and instead share some of our renewable energy that we've generated from our solar panels on the roof saving money and helping the environment so the give energy give back scheme works by allowing give energy to control your battery for a period of time they'll make sure it's charged up fully when the time is right and then they'll tell your battery to discharge to the grid during that peak time and you will get paid for that energy that you send out to the grid but you won't just get paid a little you'll get paid well over the odds for that session and you can really benefit by particip ating in these kind of schemes other batteries also integrate with smart tariffs like octopus flux for example or octopus intelligent go where you can charge your battery overnight on the cheap rate electricity and then use it to run your house during the day and in that case some customers who don't even have solar are still benefiting from an overall cheaper rate of electricity by using their battery for a kind of energy Arbitrage and just lowering that overall cost of energy by participating in some of these demand flexibility schemes as well they can ramp up their earnings from their battery even more and suddenly with 0% vat a battery can seem like a very good investment now in this situation we've installed the solar PV inverter in The Loft it's a give energy inverter as well because the solar PV circuit is fed from the backup Gateway the battery system knows how much the solar is generating and takes that into consideration when charging and discharging the battery we've also as a little side note installed a surge protection device on the DC side here for solar that's an important thing that should be done in all solar PV systems so in this particular install like the others we took a holistic approach and did an eicr and a consumer unit upgrade before doing the battery storage and solar uh the reason is again the house wiring was fairly old the consumer unit was ancient and there were no spare ways to add new circuits for solar and Battery Plus potential expansion for future because the customer's looking at maybe getting an extension in the future so we've upgraded everything with plenty of spare ways for future expansion and it's definitely something to think about if you are planning future work because there's no point in getting a tiny little extra consuming unit fitted just for your battery and solar and then having to fit another additional consum unit later on for an extension or an EV charger honestly the number of situations where I see somebody's come in and fited a heat pump and they've put a oneway consumer unit in for that then somebody's come 6 months later and fitted a separate SE consuming unit for an EV charger and somebody's come 6 months later and fitted a separate consuming unit for solar it's just ridiculous and you end up with a hotch poch of different consumer units everywhere it's not neat it takes up lots of space it's just confusing it's better to get a nice big new consum unit fitted in advance and then fill it with all all the lovely renewable Tech that you're going to add over the years so one important thing we'll need to know when Gathering your information to do a quote is what size is your main cutout fuse main cutout fuse you might wonder well what's that well it's here it's this gray Block in this case we've actually got three cuz the customer's got a three-phase supply incoming however only one phase is active so this main cutout fuse here for the phase that is active is a 100 amp main fuse we know that because it's got a label saying 100a on it why do we need to know that information well it's important for the g99 application that will have to do on your behalf with dno or distribution Network operator we basically have to apply in advance for permission to connect a generating set to the grid because that's what our battery is it's basically a generator that can push power into the Grid or pull power off the grid at certain times and the network operator needs to know about it so that they can factor that into the calculations knowing what is connected to the Grid in terms of generating sets it's the same with solar it's even the same with EV Chargers although we can notify them afterwards we need to make sure the dno knows how many EV Chargers are connected to the grid so you need a picture of your 100 amp or maybe 80 or maybe 60 amp main fuse uh and you also need a picture of your your meter with your M pan number so that we can do the application for you another thing that's really useful for your installers to have is a picture of your main consumer unit ideally with the flap up like this so that we can see how many circuit breakers there are and how many spare ways there are by spare ways we mean these These are called ways and each individual blank is a spare way that is available for future expansion so in this case we've got four spare ways which means that four additional circuits could be installed without having to upgrade this consumer unit now this is a nice modern consumer unit with rcbos they protect each and every circuit uh it's got surge protection built into it as well so if you got a nice modern consumer unit like this with spare ways then likely you're installer will be able to install the battery system straight in to this existing consumer unit now if you've got existing solar and you're wanting to add battery storage to it it'll be handy for you to share a copy of your schematic diagram and a photo of the label on the side of the inverter so we know what size inverter you've got currently how many solar panels you've got because then we can size the battery storage system taking into consideration your existing solar system this is an example of a schematic diagram here you can see how many panels you've got what size inverter you've got and how everything's connected together it's a really good diagram and every Sol PV system should have one of those so you should find it either near the consumer unit or near the inverter so one thing that's really important to know is where you want to install your battery there are so many different options with battery storage as you might see we can install them outside or inside but in any case you're going to need quite a large blank wall to fit the battery and any Associated equipment so something your installer will need to know is where do you prefer to fit the battery or where is the most suitable space could it be on uh an inside wall somewhere in the house could it be on an outside wall somewhere near the house preferably near the meter box or would you prefer it to be in an out building like a garage whether that's an attached garage or a detached garage and where the battery is is going to make a big difference to the cable run from from the consume unit to the battery so we'll talk about that now so in the case of our Tesla power wall install we had the Gateway right next to the meter and the battery remote in this particular install we've got the Gateway and the battery remote so there's different setups as you can see let's talk through the cable route in this particular install and how we did it welcome to windy Britain here's our house where our consumer unit and electricity meter is and here here's our garage where our battery is below me is a path so you might wonder well how did we get a cable from one to the other and the answer is digging we've got an amazing groundworks contractor that we work with who came in they lifted these slabs installed a duct from the house to the garage so that we could then come in afterwards and pull in cables and that's the thing you need to remember is if you're installing the battery in an out building that's away from the house you will inevitably need ground works now you might already have a power supply to a building like this a garage and if you do we're going to need to know a bit more information about the power supply that's there and whether it's big enough to be able to connect the battery or not in this case it just had a double socket in it which was not enough to take a battery off of so we've run a brand new Big Supply to the garage here but in some cases you might already have a big chunky Supply so what we'll ask for is a picture of your garage consumer unit if you have one and in the circuit on this side we'd like to identify the size of the circuit breaker that feeds the garage and know what size ca's going out there and then we can do the calculations for you to know whether we can connect to your existing garage Supply or whether we need to run a new cable out there in the garage here we've installed our cabling from the duck to where it comes through from the ground along some cable tray and up here into our Gateway and as I said we installed from a switch fuse in the house into the gateway and then the power comes back from the Gateway into the main house consu unit unit to provide that whole house back up um but it's quite a complicated install this and that's why usually we prefer to fit the Gateway as close to the meter box as possible and then potentially you can fit the battery remotely like we did with the Tesla but it's just one cable and not such a big cable that needs to go from that Gateway or consumer unit to the battery now you might say but you've installed solar on the roof why didn't you just install the batteries in The Loft along with the inverter and that is a really good question for me there are multiple reasons why not to install batteries in a loft one of them being the weight batteries are extremely heavy so if you are fitting batteries in a loft you've got to be confident that the Loft structure and joists are capable to take that amount of weight but also you got to think about your poor installers how are they going to get the batteries up your Loft Ladder into the Loft safely often times it's just impossible to get a heavy battery up a loft ladder and into a loft the other thing to take into consideration is fire safety although batteries are safe and they're built to not combust still somehow for me it just feels a bit wrong to fit a battery in a loft now I'll let you debate that in the comments but for me it's a nogo I might stretch to fitting an inverter in a loft from time to time like in this case where it's a beautiful Loft we've boarded it out we've put a smoke alarm in place so all of the safety measures are in place but I won't usually stretch to fitting batteries in a loft unless it's exceptional circumstances now we've only covered a few different battery storage systems here we'd love to know from you what is your favorite battery storage system which one do you think is the best let's continue the conversation in the comments below but for today we're really glad that you've joined us on this journey if you did enjoy this video and find it valuable it really helps if you share it out with somebody else and of course if you did like it why not settle in and watch a couple more up here there'll be links to videos that YouTube thinks you will enjoy but either way thanks for watching and we'll see you again soon

Channel: Artisan Electrics

Views: 76,559

Keywords: artisan electrics, electrician life, battery storage, battery, 10

Id: d4WwYfafdRg

Length: 44min 5sec (2645 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2024