You can save as much as 85 per cent on vitality payments with a house battery – however might you even have a ‘zero invoice’ house?

Homeowners could save up to £796 per year on their energy bills by installing a battery storage system in their home, according to The Energy Savings Trust.

For a three-bedroom home, with average energy prices, this could equate to as much as 85 per cent of their energy costs.

While solar panels alone can save the typical household some £310 each year, battery storage systems enable energy transferred from sunlight to be stored for use at night.

Using solar panels alone will save homeowners around 30 per cent of their energy bill, according to Mark Millar, chief executive of battery maker Puredrive Energy.

He said: ‘The average home [with solar panels] consumes 10 kilowatt hours of energy per day, except only 30 per cent of the energy gets absorbed into the home because we generate in the day but use energy in the evenings and mornings.

‘The other 70 per cent of the energy goes to the grid, So the homeowner doesn’t see a benefit to that.’

According to Millar, adding a battery system allows this otherwise wasted energy to be stored and used in the evening and potentially the next morning, increasing savings to 60 per cent.

While some 1.4million UK households have solar panels, around 4.9 per cent of the population, just 43 per cent of those with solar panels, or 602,000, also have a home battery.

The most up-to-date systems, however, can make the most of variable tariffs to store energy when it is cheap, for use during periods where it is more expensive. It is this, Millar said, that can bring savings up to 85 per cent.

‘It’s a big change that has really happened over the past year or two,’ Millar said, ‘Some energy firms offer agile tariffs where the price of energy changes ever hour or so… if you have a smart battery then it knows when rates are cheap, and discharges energy when rates are high.’

Puredrive manufactures Duracell Energy’s new Dura 5 home battery. The product competes with the likes of Tesla and Sunsynk, both of which also offer home storage systems.

Installing a battery storage system in your home could put you on the way to cutting your bills, but according to Puredrive it can also allow you to stop paying energy bills altogether.

By combining solar panels, a home battery and an air-source heat pump, homeowners can create a system that requires nothing from the grid, the firm said.

‘Zero bills’, Millar said, can currently be achieved by those with brand new homes combining these technologies with selling their excess energy back to the grid during peak times.

Homeowners can use the Government’s Smart Export Guarantee to sell their excess energy. The SEG tariff has replaced the Feed-in Tariff scheme, which closed in 2019.

‘District network operators will give you money if your support the grid,’ he told this is Money. ‘If you’re watching Manchester United versus Liverpool, at half time kettles will go on and there’s a surge in usage. You get paid money to be able to support the grid, and when you combine this with the technology in your home, the whole objective is to get to zero bills.’

How much could this technology set you back?

The cost of installing a solar system can vary wildly depending on which products you plan to fit, as well as the type of property you plan to make the installation in.

Typically, installing an entire system consisting of an air source heat pump, solar panels and a home battery could set homeowners back £20,000 according to data from EcoQuoteToday, or £12,500 with the Government’s £7,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme discount.

This figure, Millar said, is largely made up of the installation costs, meaning that if the technology is installed during the building process this could be far lower.

He said: ‘If you put these in when you built a home then you’ve already got scaffolding to put the roof on, so solar panels can be installed at the same time. The cables can also be added during the build process.’

‘We’re talking £4,000, for any new home, if you installed this technology on an existing home then an installer would charge around £12,000.’

Battery-only installations on the rise

For many, the cost of installing batteries, heat pumps and solar panels could be far out of their budget for home improvements.

However, Millar says battery-only installations are becoming more popular due to them having an easy installation process that can dramatically reduce costs compared to full installation.

‘The payback is a lot quicker,’ he said. ‘You’re charging the battery when its cheap, paying 8p instead of 30p per kilowatt hour, you’d make significant savings.

‘A couple of times per day the energy will cost just 5p, your batteries can be charged during that time and then use the energy all day long.’

To install a battery alone, homeowners can expect to pay in the region of £4,000 to £5,000.

However, Millar points out that battery-only installations cannot give homeowners independence from the grid. He said: ‘That’s the difference that you know from a philosophical perspective. Its going to be cheaper now but is it going to be cheaper next year or the year after? That depends on the energy supplier.’