"The HIA Perth Homeshow was held between 3 and 6 March. I featured on Synergy's stand to give visitors and prospective battery customer’s firsthand experience of living with a battery. It was a great event attended by many curious people asking a lot of questions. Some of these questions made me realise there is certainly some misinformation out there about how the batteries work and when they work.

Many people were curious and thought residential batteries could enable them to go totally off grid. Before my experience as part of this trial, I believed a residential battery could work when outages interrupted power. This question also came up a lot at the Homeshow. Overall, all visitors to the Synergy stand were positive about battery technology but were holding off considering it for their own homes because of the price.  

How my battery has performed in this cycle has been quite interesting. We've experienced quite a few days with temperatures in excess of 30 degrees so we had our air-conditioning running most days. This saw our projected bill increase to $100. You might not think this is much but you'd be quite surprised how quickly you get used to low power bills! This billing cycle is normally around $450, so it's still 75% cheaper compared to current projections.

There has also been a few days in this cycle that demonstrate winter performance and a few days where the battery has not even charged. In the past 28 days the battery has been totally depleted and not available for the whole night for 17 of those days.   

The time the battery is taking to charge has also dramatically changed from four hours in the December period to seven hours currently.  

Despite this, there are still considerable savings projected but certainly not the degree of savings able to be realised in the longer summer days."

Deciding to install a battery at your home is a considerable upfront investment, as John has noted, but it can be an effective way to make the most of your solar PV system...Discover the savings you could potentially see with battery power or read our FAQs.