Creating a battery only proposal

Summary:

With OpenSolar you have the option to create a battery-only proposal at your fingertips and easier than ever.

If you are adding a battery to an existing PV please take a look at this article

Table of contents:

Creating the design

Adding the battery location

Selecting your correct tariff

Creating a battery control

Understanding the proposal 

Creating the design:

When creating a design for a battery-only proposal all you need to do is:

• Go to the design
• Select your battery tab
• Select the battery drop-down
• Choose the battery you want to use through the manual process or the battery design assistant.

From this window you will have several options to ensure the battery is behaving as you intend:

AC or DC-connected buttons

Battery control scheme: This tells the battery how to behave. You can use one of our predefined battery control schemes or you can create your own in Control > Design & Hardware > Battery control scheme. 

Load offsettable: is the % of load at any given time that the battery can offset (hence the discharge rate cannot be greater than the % of the load that is off-settable).

Load offsettable cap:is essentially the max kW that the battery can discharge at to offset the load.

Once the battery configuration is complete, you can go into the pricing tab for the project and add the pricing for your component or ensure this is being populated correctly if this is set up in the control.

Adding the battery location:

You can take advantage of our advance settings and add an annotation so your customer know where in their home you are adding this item. To do so, expand the advanced settings in the top right corner and select annotation from the options. 

You can give your annotation a label and mark it to show to your customer.

Once the design is complete, you can save the design window.

Selecting your correct tariff:

What will truly make the savings for your battery appear correctly is a combination of the tariff selected and the control scheme given to the battery. This means that to ensure the savings are correct, it is a good idea to make sure the stated tariff in the energy tab is correct.

This is done by selecting the energy tab within your design

Scroll down to the electricity rate section and take a look at the tariff stated. If this is not correct, you can use the "select tariff" button which will give you a pop-out that will enable you to locate the correct tariff.

If you need to see the breakdown of the selected tariff, you can click on the tariff name and a pop-out will appear with all its setup. 

Creating a battery control:

When needed, creating a battery control scheme could be beneficial. This is especially the case if you have a time-of-use tariff. This means that your tariff price will vary throughout the day and could be higher and lower at certain times. Let's say for example:

• The tariff states that from 7 AM - 8 PM, it will charge 0.157 but from 8 PM - 7 AM it will charge 0.35. It is beneficial to create a control scheme that will charge the battery on the day from the grid and discharge at night 8 PM - 7 AM to the home. You can find more information about creating your own schemes here.

Understanding the proposal:

When both the battery and the tariff are configured correctly, the online proposal will display all the savings for said setup. By using the example provided above, the proposal now shows the savings the customer would see on their monthly bill by just adding a battery that charges during the day with the low rate and discharges during the night during peak times: