After six months with my rooftop solar panels, the biggest change has been using a home battery during the evening peak. Before the battery was installed, my household sent plenty of solar power back to the grid at lunchtime and then bought electricity again after dinner. That felt especially wasteful in summer, when the air conditioner was running until bedtime.

Now, the battery charges from solar during the day and usually carries us from about 5 p.m. until midnight. I have changed the inverter settings to prioritize self-consumption, with a small reserve left for outages. On sunny days, our grid use is almost nothing until the next morning. My electricity bill has fallen by roughly 35 percent compared with the same months last year. The exact saving varies with cloudy weather and air-conditioning use, but avoiding those expensive peak-hour purchases makes the difference obvious.

The setup was less complicated than I expected, although the installer needed an extra afternoon to improve the Wi-Fi signal near the energy storage unit. I wanted battery monitoring on my phone, and the first week showed several gaps in the data. The system itself kept working; only the app was slow to update. Repositioning the router solved most of it.

I also spent time comparing the economics of buying a larger battery versus simply shifting heavy loads into daylight. In the end, I chose a moderate-sized battery and now run the washing machine, dishwasher, and water heater while the panels are producing. That combination has been more useful than oversizing storage.

I had originally searched online for ways to “fabriquer” a DIY solar battery, but I decided professionally installed equipment was safer for my home. So far, the practical win is simple: more of my own solar energy stays in the house, my peak-hour consumption is lower, and I think less about electricity prices every evening.