Unpopular opinion: Home batteries are a massive waste of money for a lot of systems.
Every single time I talked about installing my system, the internet "experts" and some of my buddies came out of the woodwork to tell me the exact same thing: "If you don’t get a battery, the whole system is completely pointless."
Well, it’s been up for three months now, and I’m glad I ignored them.
My setup is an 18.6kW solar array with a 17kW Huawei inverter. Absolutely zero battery storage. Instead of dropping thousands on chemical storage just to buffer a measly 4–6 kWh a day for most of the year, I did something else: I put in a public-facing EV charger. It gets used daily by tourists, and I charge 45c per kW.
If you look at the stats from yesterday, you can see exactly why a battery makes zero sense for my use case. That massive green and orange block on the graph is peak production matching my peak consumption perfectly. The EV charger is doing the heavy lifting right when the sun is hitting hardest. I am directly consuming and monetizing the energy the exact second it’s generated.
The numbers from yesterday alone (04/07/2026 in the screenshot):
Total generated: 116.42 kWh
Consumed straight from PV: 69.63 kWh (That means 93.99% of my daily power came directly from the sun)
Fed to the grid: 46.79 kWh
Pulled from the grid: A grand total of 4.45 kWh
I’ve already hit 7.49 MWh of lifetime generation in just three months.
On top of the day-to-day charging, part of my roof faces North-West. In the winter, a battery would just sit there completely empty, acting as an expensive paperweight.
People need to stop treating batteries like a mandatory rule of thumb. If your daytime load matches your peak generation—or if you can actually monetize your solar noon like this—a battery is just a black hole for your ROI.
Change my mind