"It's fundamental to our architecture and just our raw personality as a company, I would say," Chris Thompson, vice president of product and technical marketing at SolarEdge, told CNET. Contact online >>
"It's fundamental to our architecture and just our raw personality as a company, I would say," Chris Thompson, vice president of product and technical marketing at SolarEdge, told CNET.
We did not conduct any hands-on testing for this review. Batteries are part of a complex home energy system that varies from house to house. Instead, this review is based on publicly available information online from SolarEdge and an interview with Thompson.
The SolarEdge Home Battery is a decent-sized 9.7 kilowatt-hour battery that comes with good performance and efficiency specs, as well as an unlimited cycle warranty. It also packs some intricate battery management features, designed to assist you in your battle against time of use rates. We'll talk more about this below.
"If you have an AC coupled battery, the power only goes to the battery once it's been converted to AC, that's an AC coupled architecture," Thompson said. "So on a DC-coupled architecture, you go directly from that PV to the battery."
Another great thing about the SolarEdge Home Battery is how it connects with other SolarEdge products. The system components are part of a sort of wireless communication ecosystem, using Google OpenThread, a wireless mesh networking protocol.
"We get two things from going to Google OpenThread," Thompson said. "One is when people are running the communications wires from their inverter to their battery, sometimes they screw it up because you never know how far the battery is from the inverter usually. The second thing is it looks better because you don't need to have this communications line running from one spot to the other."
Having a wireless system can also make system updates easier, and Thompson said the wireless system SolarEdge has in place is faster than a wired communication solution. SolarEdge also has a complex time-of-use algorithm, specifically designed to help combat unpredictable electricity rates in California.
"NEM 3.0 in California made things super complicated," Thompson said. "So we've got these very detailed time of use prices that change with the season, they change with the time of day, they change whether it's a weekend, and they're asymmetrical. So the rate for the power going in is different for the rate for the power going out."
As long as your battery system remains cloud-connected, SolarEdge's algorithm keeps up with your utility's fluctuating time of use rates and helps you save money by using energy from your battery when electricity rates are at the highest, and charging your battery when it's cheapest to do so. The best part is you don't have to do anything. The battery does it automatically.
"It runs all these algorithms in the cloud. It's pretty advanced," Thompson said. "But for the homeowner, it's 100% transparent. All that happens is the installer installs it, they put in the utility and all of it gets kind of automated in the cloud. But all of these calculations are run at night in our cloud. And it will come up with a prediction for the next day."
SolarEdge's battery isn't modular, meaning you won't be able to upgrade your storage capacity on a singular battery unit. If you find yourself needing more than 9.7 kWh, you'll have to buy another large battery versus just adding a little extra capacity to your existing battery. Needless to say, this can get expensive.
If you don't care about modularity, if 9.7 kWh (or a multiple of it) is the right size for you, or don't anticipate any capacity upgrades in the future, the SolarEdge Home Battery should serve you well.
Since the SolarEdge Home Battery has a 100% depth of discharge, you'll be able to use all of its capacity and drain it down to zero without causing damage. Just because you can drain it all in one go, doesn't mean you should. Batteries wear down over time, and continuously letting your battery die could shorten its lifespan.
The power output category isn't this battery's strongest area, but it does OK. It has two types of power output ratings: peak and continuous. Peak power is the amount of power that your battery can handle all at once without risking damage. This usually kicks in when starting power-hungry appliances, and your battery doesn't peak for very long. Continuous power output is the amount of power your battery can handle continuously at any given moment.
The SolarEdge Home Battery's power output ratings are fine, but they could be better. It has a peak power rating of 7.5 kW and a continuous power rating of 5 kW. These ratings are relatively equivalent to a Tesla Powerwall and were pretty typical to see a few years ago. Plenty of other batteries on today's market have continuous power ratings of 7 kW or higher.
The SolarEdge Home Battery has one of the best battery warranties we've seen simply because there's no cycle or throughput clause. This means there's no limit on how much you can use your battery during its standard 10-year warranty period. It's rare to see this on the battery market.
The other major aspects of the warranty are industry-standard. Your battery is covered for 10 years and will be able to maintain at least 70% of its original capacity by the end of your warranty. The Home Backup Interface and SolarEdge Home Inverters also come with 12-year warranties.
Cycles/throughput covered: To make sure your battery makes it to its years-covered mark, manufacturers will usually put a limit on how many times you can drain and recharge your battery. If you hit your covered cycles/throughput amount before your years covered mark, then your warranty expires. SolarEdge is a rare exception to this rule, offering unlimited cycles and no energy throughput limit.
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