Battery Comparison

Batteries are now often the most expensive part of your solar system and choosing which battery technology suits you can be tricky. 

• NiFE Batteries are the longest life battery (10-40 years)
• Lead Acid are the cheapest solution
  • Monoblocks (12V or 6V batteries) - These are the cheapest (3-7 years)
  • Traction Batteries (2V cells) - These are more hardy that Monoblocks (5-12 years)
• Lithium Batteries - (10 years)
• Sealed AGM Batteries (3-7 years)

What type of battery you need depends on the circumstances.

If you want your batteries in your living space they need to be sealed batteries.  If you can have the batteries outside, or in a ventilated box, then regular 'wet' batteries (Lead Acid or NifE) will be fine.  It is possible to have wet batteries inside but, as with all batteries, you will need them to be in an area with an air vent to allow any gases to escape.

A rough rule of thumb is between 100ah and 200ah of batteries, in a 12v system, per 250w. (So if in 24v system would be 50ah to 100ah and so on)

The amount of ah of batteries you choose needs to be able to be maintained by the size of your solar system.  After this it's personal preference on how much you want to spend and how much redundancy you want to have.

We have created a battery comparison chart to help you decide which type of batteries you should use.  The chart below shows various battery banks using different types of batteries and it give you an estimate of the amount of usable Kwhrs storage you will get.  We then look at the cost and number of years the battery should last in daily use.  We have taken the lower estimates of years on all batteries, and then look at the cost per Kwhr and cost per Kwhr per year.

All batteries types will last longer if not heavily discharged daily (70-100% discharge).  We would advise not designing any system that will deeply discharge your batteries daily.  Most systems should be designed with a number of hours or days of autonomy to cover days when there is less sun, it would be at these times when you drained the battery more, rather than daily.

Why do batteries have different ratings? All batteries have C5, C20, C100 ratings to stand for the amount of time the battery is discharged over.  A C5 rating means you discharge the battery completely in 5 hours, and C20 over 20 hours.  So why are these different? As a comparison consider your car, if you fill up the fuel tank and then drive at 50mph for the full tank you will get about as many miles as possible on that tank.  But if you drive at 90mph for the full tank you will only get about 1/2 - 2/3rds of the distance.

We hope this chart will be useful to guide people in their choice of batteries.

Please note: Battery prices do fluctuate and these prices are not automatically updated but give a reflection from when the table was created.