13 August

The importance of 'right-sizing' a home battery. This is the data for our place yesterday, a typical winter day. You can see from the green line that the battery charges once per day, and that's enough to get us through a full 24-hour period. The total capacity of the battery is 27 kWh. When government subsidies arrived for home batteries, many rushed out and got enormous home batteries, 30-50 kWh, or even more. It was the wankpanzer phenomenon, social status, but with batteries. The problem with getting that much storage is that it's almost impossible to fill it. And even if you do, unless your home is smelting aluminium, almost impossible to use it in a day. Meaning a lot of energy sits in the battery for many hours every day, going nowhere. That damages batteries, longer term. They don't like sitting at high levels of charge for long periods.