The 7 Best Solar Batteries in 2023

foreign y from solar reviews here and this is our 2023 top solar home energy storage battery Solutions home energy storage and Battery Solutions have been the Hot Topic probably in the last 12 months in the Solar industry at re Plus in September 2022 I literally saw I would guess maybe 50 home energy storage and Battery related solutions that I didn't see three years ago before covert at the same conference and so what we thought it was worth doing is coming up with a list of the top seven we weren't sure top five top seven but in the end there were sort of seven that stood out in an individual group and really what they stood out for is that all of the companies were what I would consider bankable so my apologies to the other solar battery and home energy storage solution providers that aren't on the list these are the ones I thought are the most bankable all of these companies are either profitable or they're part of a very large profitable corporate group to start from number seven we have Canadian Solar a new product on the market just being released at re plus since September 22 is the EP Cube It's a 10 kilowatt lithium-ion phosphate Battery Solution with an integrated battery inverter Topography of it is you know similar to the other big Solutions like powerwall where you've got the electronics and the battery effectively all in one or two boxes probably the advantage of the Canadian one is it it does have that bitter scalability and for some people a 10 kilowatt or a 20 kilowatt is just the right size if you're wondering what size battery you do need jump on solar reviews click on solar calculator or even click the estimator on the front page of the site and then select how you want to size your battery and that'll give you an idea of what size battery you need so there's one thing that's probably not well known is that different homes need different sizes and so in the a question when obviously people always ask us you know what's the best solar Battery Solution while there are traits of better and worse battery Solutions really it does depend on what size you need because there's no point paying for a 13 and a half kilowatt solution if you're never going to have enough solar to charge that fully anyway at number seven the Canadian EP Cube 10 kilowatt can jump up to 20. positives 7.6 continuous power out point which is probably at the upper end of most as I say lithium phosphate Battery Technology profitable well-known company been around listed on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ one of the two and been profitable for a number of years has an app that you can use similar to powerwall or something allows for load shifting you know to have the battery charged at off-peak times with cheap power which is another one of the key functionality items you're looking for in these sort of solutions what weighs it down it's new also the other thing is I'd say there's not a lot of details from Canadian about out where the electronics in it came from whether they've partnered with another battery inverter manufacturer they haven't released those details to the market yet so that would make me a little hesitant to buy it personally I have in another company I'm involved with a lot of history with their modules but will they understand the extra support necessary once they get into Power Electronics once they're selling battery inverters and batteries I think that's a slightly different business than selling models and so I'd be a little worried about it and that's probably why it's at the bottom end of our top seven at number six we've got another new product probably the best known brand in the world in batteries and that's the Panasonic ever Vault 2 a positive of this it's a 17.5 kilowatt solution if that's roughly what you need and how much excess solar power you might have to store or if that's the amount you might need to store to get through a night of the whole peak time if you like in your home that could be the right size for you so if that is it's a positive obviously nine point six kilowatts continuous Peak power which is really really high another positive lithium phosphate I probably am not enough of an expert really to be giving a strong opinion on whether lithium phosphate both Canadian and Panasonic use the first two solutions on the list is better or worse however generally speaking the consensus seems to be that lithium phosphate is safer longer lasting and slightly cheaper and the lithium nickel manganese Cobalt batteries that a number of other people use in a sort of Tesla power or Tesla motor cars have used that battery their benefits is a little bit more energy dense but there are some people that have some safety concerns about them in that they're more likely to overheat or catch fire but that hasn't really been a major problem as far as I know so I probably see it as a slight positive the fact that Panasonic 7 volt is lithium-ion phosphate although other people disagree with that so and I'm probably not the best person really later to settle that argument the other thing about the Panasonic solution which is a bit cool is well it's got the app I think all of these on these lists have got a phone app that will show you you know how much power's in your battery and how much you're using your home's using things like this it allows for load shifting the cool thing about the Panasonic is it's both AC and DC coupled you can retrofit it to an existing solar system and AC couple with that old existing solar system but then add new panel capacities and DC couple of those DC coupling is technically more efficient in that you have less lossages because you've got less power conversions in the chain of getting power from your solar panels into your battery and then back out to your home for use at some point you've only got one conversion when you've got AC coupled you've actually got three conversions you're converting from the solar panel to AC at the grid connect inverter then the battery inverter the energy storage system is converting it back to DC to store into your battery and then when you need to use it it needs to come out in DC from your battery and be flipped back to AC which is the type of power your home uses so the fact that the Panasonic and also the Canadian solution are offering both AC and DC coupling options I think is is an advantage however again the only reason the Panasonic probably wouldn't be higher in my list is their version 2.0 is brand new and out they also haven't said a lot about who's making they're in battery inverted in the overall solution and I'm more worried about inverter Electronics typically than what I am about battery cells or about solar panels battery cells and solar panels don't have any moving Parts inverter electronics are much more complex and you only need a little software glitch in something like that for a system not to work and so the newness of the product although Panasonic very reputable company bro very profitable very large group been in solar a long time although they Outsource the manufacturing of their modules now still at number six on the list a very good solution and definitely worth considering at number five on the list is the solar Edge home battery it's been called a few things that used to be called I think storage when you choose to buy a solar system from solaredge you can either go from I think they're called their HD wave or something they're standard grid connect inverters which go with their power optimizers so the power optimizers go under each panel and optimize the MPP tracking of each panel optimize the power output it comes down to a box on the wall which looks like a string inverter which simply does the DC to AC conversion once that's their standard model with their home energy storage solution then you're using their you know home hub inverter and their home battery together it's a 9.7 kilowatt size five kilowatts of continuous Peak output power which which is not too bad I mean it's what say the Tesla was you know up until the most recent version of the Tesla that was five although the Tesla is now seven kilowatts of peak output power some advantages you know it has an integrated EV charger also it's DC coupled because of the nature of solar edges business and their power optimizes the fact that the power comes down off the roof still is DC made a DC coupled solution you know make more sense so they both quite High round trip efficiencies compared to some of the other more common AC coupled systems that are on the market so they don't have integration to a generator at this point for people that are considering this because of the loss of the grid and outages and wildfires and hurricanes and things like that then the connection with a backup generator is awesome in my view so the fact that it doesn't have that a bit of a downside it may well in the future at number four on our list is the end phase IQ energy storage system this is is a little bit different and again the pro of this is probably if you're an end phase fan and many of you watching this will already have solar systems that use the end phase micro inverters and phase micro inverters are a type of inverter where both the DC to AC conversion and the MPP maximum PowerPoint optimization of power output happens under each panel and then there's an AC trunk cable that comes down and plugs into your power system so given that that is the nature of how their micro inverters worked and they are known as a very good micro inverter company then it made sense for them to have an AC coupled battery another positive is it's a lithium phosphate battery which we tend to like a core difference is it has a couple of different size modules and it has a really small three kilowatt size module which may be really attractive for some people because it can give you some battery storage a very very small amount of battery storage literally enough only to run a few lights for an hour or two or maybe a well pumped to pump water if you live in a rural area and you need you know to be able to pump water to flush your toilet or something like that a little low-cost solution for some people might be really interesting in the 10 kilowatt iqng storage system then you've got a continuous max power output I think it's 3.84 kilowatt so that's at the lower end of the range compared to you know some of the other Solutions now as I said it's AC coupled it does have load shifting abilities though so it does have the ability to set the battery to charge at certain times and it does have a phone app and again as with all these seven companies end phase are a very large profitable company I think their market cap something crazy like 30 or 40 billion dollars now and their micro inverters are very highly regarded so they do have the advantage over say a Canadian Solar or something that they have been in inverter electronics for quite a long time a little bit newer to batteries I guess at number three you know we have the Sonnen core battery the Sun and our company we really like they're a German company they're being at the battery game or I guess the home energy storage game for probably almost longer than anybody else on this list I would say they bought a number of years ago by Royal Dutch Shell whilst I don't think their battery unit itself is probably profitable I'm not 100 sure of that but I suspect it's probably not the fact that they're backed by Royal Dutch Shell and the Royal Dutch show was such a big Energy company and they know over the next 50 years they have to transition out of oil to different energy sources they were smart enough really early to see that we had to go to Renewables because we need power that doesn't pollute the planet but Renewables are intermittent and that's why battery storage is so exciting to everybody is it's the missing piece that pulls Renewables together it turns Renewables from intermittent and reliable power sources to what can effectively be base load and that's why I think everybody in the industry is so excited about energy storage and it really is getting to the time now with the new inflation reduction act with you know there being the 30 tax credit back for battery storage now so you can buy any of these battery Solutions and get 30 of the cost off your tax next year so it really is worth doing them you know it's a great thing it gives you backup power as somebody that's came home to this Farm seven or eight years ago before I had batteries when they'd been a grid outage for a couple of days and had to clean up the contents of my freezer all over my kitchen floor you only need that to happen one or two times to realize the batteries are a really cool thing to have if nothing else and so back to the Sonnen 10 or 20 kilowatts so it's 10 and it's scalable and they can be piggy back together I think up to three so they can go up to 60 kilowatt hours of storage which if you want to is really big they're an AC coupled solution so they really like Tesla where they really built themselves to retrofit to you know existing solar systems very easily without having to mess around with that existing solar system they've done some really good things with the Rocky Mountain Power utility in Utah one of their dealers I think they're called maybe es or ESS maybe they've done really cool project where they've attached batteries to almost every solar system the great thing about it there is it's a utility starting to realize whilst the utilities have generally been against distributed solar panels on roofs everywhere on homes they realize the power of having energy storage in the home because that energy storage can serve Peak loads at peak times and reduce the peak draw on the network in the busiest times of days so they're using battery storage technology as a means of managing the grid and this is really what battery storage can do it can do great things for you as a homeowner and it can give you a return that's okay like it's not probably as good as just a grid connection system but then solar system with batteries is heaps cooler because you have that backup power and you know at night you're still running off the solar power you generated in the day which in terms of love of your system I know it's hard to quantify what that's worth but it is worth something like it's really cool I don't know anybody that has a battery system that doesn't like having it and so son in a very good solution you know high up and doing a lot in the market and really all the time when I've met their people and talked to the dealers about them and their company they're highly regarded people that work from tend to be really nice people really invested and I really do feel like they're going to try hard to look after their customers you know even if there are some ups and downs in any of these seven Solutions will have their ups and downs and the odd failure here or there or something like that what I was really looking for in all these companies are companies that I feel will support people and support their clients you know through the life of owning the product and so the second solution is the Generac power cell pwr sell but pronounce power cell and to be honest it was a real toss-up about whether the Generac power cell or the Tesla power was going to be our number one solution because to be honest if I had a choice of buying the Generac power cell or the Tesla power wall I'd probably buy the Generac power cell because it has some more interesting characteristics about it first of all it scales between 9 and 18 kilowatts in three kilowatt increments and I really like that as I say not everyone needs the 13 and a half kilowatt hour Tesla Power Wheel if you're only ever going to have nine kilowatts of spare solar power or you only ever use nine kilowatts overnight there's really no point you having a bigger battery well there can be if your predominant focus in buying a battery is the length of time you can run during an outage how long our outage you can still have powerful then perhaps there is still worthwhile having a bigger battery and you know charging it at off peak Off the Grid beyond what you saw solar system is sized for but generally speaking you know you sort of don't want to pay for a heap more battery capacity than what you need the Generac pwr power cell 12 kilowatts of Maximum instantaneous output which is much bigger than the Tesla that's why I think it's more interesting in the world where we're going towards possibly autonomous homes in a larger systems and using the grid far less fact that it has that big draw and I have a separate generate power cell review that I'm doing so I won't go on it too much because I don't want this video to get too long but feel free to jump in to the individual reviews I do of these individual products for those of you I probably should say that don't know Generac background Generac have been in Backup home power for I think maybe 60 or 70 years they I think they have something crazy like a 70 market share in the Backup gas-fired backup power generators and so these guys really do know what people need in the event of a power blackout and they're somewhat unique in that respect the other interesting thing about them you know as with the Panasonic and the new Canadian Solar solution is it offers both AC coupling for retrofitting to an existing solar but also DC coupling so you can actually have a retrofitted say six kilowatt existing solar system plug into it but then decide you want another three kilowatts of panels or five kilowatts or whatever and then you can actually DC couple that at the same time so you sort of Get The Best of Both Worlds the other thing is obviously Generac being such a big player in gas storage generators that it has a generator integration and a lot of them don't have generator backup and so if you're in a residential environment where the power never really goes out very much it's probably not of much interest but if you're in a rural area or an area where you have a lot of buyers or storms or a regular occurrence the idea that you can set your home up with a solar system a battery and a gas fire generator really means that you can survive Armageddon light you're good your solar is going to keep you going day after day the grid can be out for a week the utility can be down for a week your solar will keep you going and if ever it's short then you know your gas fire generator will turn on for a while batteries and gas generators together are a really good solution and I actually even think there's a market for that for people that even don't have solar although obviously if you're using gas all the time you're not really you know solving environmental issues the problem with generators the old gas fire generators if it's a 10 KVA generator when it turns on it produces 10 KVA it doesn't have the smarts to go up and down but your house might only be using two kilowatts of power at that time so the fact that it can produce 10 push them all into a battery if the battery is large enough to take that sort of power and both be powering your house and filling up your battery until it's not needed cut off and then your house just runs on the battery so that's why I like Generac and so number one on our list and congratulations to them is the Tesla powerwall Tesla are a phenomenal company and they've done a phenomenal job pioneering solutions that deal with climate change the cars are great power wall is a good product they you know they do come out and make really big promises but then the engineers work really really hard and during the year they've released a new version of the power wall so the capacity is still at that 13.5 kilowatt it is a lithium MC battery which you know I'd probably prefer the lithium phosphate from what I hear it's AC coupled which again it was built to retrofit to existing systems because I thought that was the most ready Market it's fairly cost effective I haven't talked about costs a lot in this video ranking the top seven one of the reasons I haven't is because you find for most of them most of them are between about eight hundred dollars and a thousand dollars per kilowatt hours of storage so if it's a 10 10 kilowatt system you know it's between 10 kilowatt hour storage battery home energy storage system then it's probably between about you know eight thousand and ten thousand dollars so all these companies at least seem pretty much in these range I'm sure if I trolled around and looked at all the 50 other new battery and home energy storage solution providers there'd be some people offering some lower cost products but with this sort of thing I really wouldn't be wanting to go with a company that really didn't have the corporate Banking and it made Tesla number one on our list you know Tesla is a large profitable company the downside of Tesla and the reason I personally would probably buy a Sonnen or a power cell rather than a Tesla I don't really like their model and I don't really like their model in residential solar at all where the idea is just sign up through a website and then they'll get some contractor to come and install it you know or even maybe their own Cruise it's really hard in that model for them to deal with local service and this is the same with all large corporate solar companies and to be honest it's one of the reasons I probably although Generac have recently had some issues with some of the inverted Old Piper inverters they bought as well I I feel like that that company for 50 years it's been supporting backup generators in people's homes they sort of have a better Last Mile strategy of getting out and being able to service these products in homes Tesla's centralized thing I think is going to lead to a lot of people not feeling like they get the service they need with these products they'll get sold too efficiently they will get installed efficiently probably but whether I'm I'm still somewhat nervous about that model whether they'll actually be the same customer service you would get from a small local Solar Company and indeed it would be my advice if you want to buy a powerwall and at one of my homes I actually have a power I would actually buy it not through Tesla directly I would actually buy through a local Solar Company because then you've got local service should anything go wrong like a local family-owned small or mid-sized Solar Company would be my advice so there you go who would have thought five years ago that we'd have seven fairly complete and competitive home energy storage offerings on the market you know in the range of 800 to a thousand bucks a kilowatt hour of storage capacity that's all for now if you like this video please hit like And subscribe and I'll make some more if you're interested more in any of the solutions I will make some individual reviews for these individual products where I talk about them in a little bit more detail and there's also some videos going up on our websites of some Fireside Chats I've had with say solar Edge and Generac and a couple of Canadian Solar for instance also look out for our 2023 update to our best solar panels coming out soon sorry there hasn't been a lot published on our Channel this year we've just been busy with a lot of other things in terms only so it's good to be back making some content for you and if you're looking at a home Battery Solution as always solar reviews the great thing about us is we're a conduit to finding you know the best solar companies in America there's seven or eight hundred you know mainly mid-size or family-owned solar companies around America that you can get quotes on through our site almost all of them do one or more of these battery solutions that you can get a quote from and the solar calculator on the front of solarreviews.com if you go to that tell us what your power bill is where you live we'll be able to work out what size of Battery Solution you need for your home that's all for now have a great day thanks for watching if you enjoyed that video be sure to subscribe and check out our other content foreign [Music]

Channel: SolarReviews

Views: 69,688

Keywords: home energy storage, energy storage solution 2023, top solar batteries, solar storage 2023, solar batteries 2023, solar batteries, best solar batteries 2023, which solar battery is best, canadian solar, solar battery, tesla powerwall, generac pwrcell, solarreviews, home battery backup, solar battery for home, solaredge battery, enphase, sonnen battery, top 7 home energy storage solutions, best home energy storage solution, home energy storage solutions, best solar battery

Id: 0PQmgSyarNk

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2023