The shorter days and colder nights are well and truly here. Read below and find out some important tips to ensure your battery system remains healthy this Winter.
Protect your Battery Cells
When temperatures drop and daylight hours reduce, it’s important to make sure your battery system is programmed correctly for the Autumn/Winter period. You may already know that most, if not all battery systems have a reserve SOC (State of Charge) implemented from the minute your storage solution is installed. This is done for many reason, but some include:
- Stopping the battery cells from depleting to 0% ensures that they do not go into standby mode. Once in standby for a short period of time, the voltage in the cells lower and can lead to you losing the ability to charge the battery from surplus solar or from the grid.
- If voltage in the cells drops below 50%, the only way to charge the batteries is from a plug-in DC charger.
Raise minimum SOC for Winter
Some modern battery solutions offer a 100% depth of discharge, meaning you can cycle the battery from 100% to 0% and back up to 100% with no restrictions. This is great when surplus solar is almost guaranteed throughout the Spring and Summer. However, lower PV production from October to March could result in the vast majority of solar generation flowing directly into the home, with little to no surplus available to charge the battery system. Therefore, it is strongly recommended, even if your battery solution offers a 100% depth of discharge, to keep a reserve in the cells.
Automatic vs Manual
Depending on the solution you have installed by us, this feature may already be implemented for you. Some monitoring platforms enable us, as installers, to set this reserve SOC in bulk for all of our customers, where some require manual input. However, all systems we install have a minimum SOC set from the word go. If you’re unsure if your battery is setup correctly for Winter, give us a call or send an email to [email protected].