More and more homeowners installing solar panels ask themselves whether it's worth adding a battery. The short answer: it depends on how much independence from the grid you want and on your consumption habits. Here's the longer answer.
A solar battery, like the Enphase IQ Battery that Solarlife installs, stores the energy your panels produce during the day that you don't use at that moment, so you can use it at night or during a power outage. Without a battery, that surplus is exported to the grid (with financial compensation, but at a price well below what you pay to consume electricity).
It depends on the installed capacity and which circuits you want to keep running. A properly sized battery can keep a house's essential circuits going (fridge, lighting, router, some sockets) for several hours, or even through an entire overnight outage, depending on the house's actual consumption.
Manufacturers like Enphase offer long-term warranties on their storage systems, with a service life designed to accompany a photovoltaic installation through many years of daily use (charging and discharging).
We work with Enphase IQ Battery units, known for their reliability and backed by a long-term warranty. They integrate with the same Enphase microinverters as your panels and are managed from a single app, so you can see in real time how much you're self-consuming, storing or exporting to the grid.
If you install the battery at the same time as the panels, both are covered by the same legalisation process. If you add it later to an existing system, the boletín eléctrico needs to be updated to reflect the change — at Solarlife we handle that paperwork too.
It's not essential, but it makes sense if: you want protection from power cuts, your consumption is concentrated in the evening/night (when there's no sun), or you want to maximise self-consumption instead of exporting surplus to the grid at a low price.
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