With 11 days to go until Christmas, Michelle Obama has launched her bid to join Christmas bestseller lists across the globe, Simon Cowell et al have launched their usual bid for the Christmas Number 1 song slot, and the nation prepares once more to vote in the Strictly Come Dancing final tomorrow.

A similar end-of-year flurry is taking place in the home battery storage market, all with a view to turbo-charging the market in 2019.

In the last few weeks:

Four weeks ago, we compared the warranties of Tesla’s Powerwall 2, Powervault 3 and Pylontech.

This week, both Powerwall 2 and Powervault 3 have updated – and improved – their warranties.

Powervault has in fact changed the underlying chemistry of its battery and launched GridFlex^TM, but more on that next week…

For Powerwall 2 customers, the update is retrospective which is good news for our Powerwall 2 customers.

Now to the fine print….

Following our analysis of Powervault 3 vs Powerwall 2, we had a couple of requests for a review of the SoFar / Pylontech residential battery storage system.

On the face of it, the SoFar / Pylontech combination offers good value, flexible sizing, and LFP (Lithium Ferro Phosphate) chemistry… so well worth consideration.

And that's before you appreciate the fun to be had when trying to summarise the essence of the different warranties: Pylontech vs Powerwall vs Powervault.

Here goes…

When considering battery storage, the costs are vital. So let’s see how they stack up for two of the biggest brands, Powervault 3 and Tesla’s Powerwall 2. As a rough guide, for someone installing a battery as part of a solar system (thus with a VAT rate of 5%), the rough costs are as follows:

I have an abiding memory from secondary school of our chemistry teacher pressing ‘play’ on an old video cassette, and there, projected onto the screen at the front of the room, was a video made by what must have been a desperately struggling actor, dressed in yellow tights and a white coat, dancing on a lab bench and singing the 'Periodic Table song'.  

The video served two purposes:

• it put us off chemistry;
• it put us off acting.

At least it put me off acting. Kristin Scott Thomas attended the school a few years before I did, and clearly, it didn’t put her off acting (credits include Four Weddings and a Funeral, The English Patient, and most recently Winston Churchill’s long suffering wife in Darkest Hour ). No dancing on lab benches for her just to pay the bills.

To the video’s credit, more than a couple of decades later, I can still remember the first two rows of the Periodic Table. Of course I’ve never used the knowledge, until the advent of home battery storage.

Today, as the second in our series of blogs on Powervault 3, we are studying Lithium Ferro Phosphate (Powervault 3) vs  Lithiated Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide (Tesla Powerwall 2).

Don’t worry, ‘Studying’ is over-egging it. We’re looking at the differences from a home battery storage point of view...

UK-based Powervault has recently launched Powervault 3, a home battery storage system which is designed to take full advantage of the revolution taking place in the UK electricity market.

Powervault totally ‘gets’ the future of electricity generation and storage in the UK and has built a battery system that can do everything you could ever think a homeowner would want it to be able to do…