Home battery storage, installed by engineers.

For most homes with solar, yes, and the reason is simple arithmetic. A unit of electricity you use yourself replaces one you would buy at the price cap rate of 26.32p per kWh (1 October to 31 December 2026), while a unit you export earns 12p on Octopus Outgoing Fixed. A battery moves your own daytime generation into the evening, so more of it displaces 26p imports instead of earning 12p exports. Whether it pays back in a timescale you are happy with depends on how much you generate, how much you use after dark and the tariff you are on, which is why we model it from your real usage rather than a brochure figure.

Size it to the electricity you use between when the sun goes down and when it comes up, not to the biggest unit on the price list. A home on Ofgem's medium typical consumption of around 2,700 kWh a year uses roughly 7 kWh a day, and a good share of that is in the evening, so 5 to 10 kWh of usable storage covers most households; a home with an EV, a heat pump or a hot tub needs more. Sigenergy SigenStor stacks in 5 kWh or 8 kWh modules and Duracell offers 5 kWh and 16 kWh units, so we can match the size to the house rather than the other way round.

It depends entirely on what is drawing from it. A house ticking over on 500 W (fridge, router, a TV, a few lights) would take about 20 hours to use 10 kWh; one running a 3 kW oven, a tumble dryer and the kettle would use it in a few hours. In practice a 10 kWh battery charged by the panels during the day covers a typical home from early evening to the following morning, and a smart tariff can top it up overnight at a lower rate for the morning peak.

Yes, and it is one of the most common jobs we do. Older feed-in-tariff systems keep their original inverter and we add an AC-coupled battery with its own inverter beside it; newer systems can often take a DC-coupled battery through a hybrid inverter, which is more efficient. Either way the export meter, the generation meter and any FIT payments are unaffected, and we install to PAS 63100, the fire-safety specification BS 7671 now requires for batteries in homes.

Not until 31 March 2027. The 0% VAT rate on installing energy-saving materials in homes covers battery storage, whether it is fitted with new solar or added to an existing system, and is due to revert to the 5% reduced rate after that date. Separately, VAT has been removed from household electricity bills from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027.

Usually a garage, a utility room or the loft, somewhere ventilated and accessible. Batteries in dwellings are now required to be installed to PAS 63100:2024, the BSI specification for fire safety in domestic battery installations, which BS 7671:2018+A4:2026 incorporates for homes. Every Green Tech Hub battery install is MCS-certified for battery storage (NIC-600049) and carried out by NICEIC-registered engineers.

A system of up to 3.68 kW per phase is connected under G98 and notified to your network operator after the install. Most solar-plus-battery systems with a 5 or 6 kW hybrid inverter are above that and need a G99 application before we start, which we submit for you. Birmingham, the Black Country, Worcestershire and most of Staffordshire are on National Grid's West Midlands network; Coventry, Tamworth and Burton are on its East Midlands area.