SunPower SunVault Review: A Solid Solar Battery from a Top Solar Company

 You're probably not shopping for just a solar battery. You're likely shopping for an entire solar panel system. And if you are, you might be considering SunPower, which is one of the top solar companies out there and offers the most efficient solar panels on the market. That means you might be getting SunPower's solar battery, the SunVault. 

The SunVault isn't the most efficient choice on the market, but it does offer large capacity sizes and good performance. SunPower also offers a competitive, unlimited-cycle battery warranty. The SunVault was designed to integrate with SunPower solar panels and offers customers a more comprehensive system install approach. SunVault can be installed with third-party solar panels on an existing solar array as long as it's paired with a compatible inverter.  

"With SunPower, you're going to a one-stop shop, so you get solar on your roof, you get the monitoring, and you get the storage," Nate Coleman, chief technology officer at SunPower, told CNET. "It's all coming from a single company, all backed by a single warranty."

Here's what you should know about the SunPower SunVault. 

battery options too. Contact solar installers you're interested in and see which batteries they carry. 

How we evaluated the best solar batteries

Every solar battery is different and is not going to be the right fit for every home. Without an on-site inspection and energy audit, it's difficult to determine which solar battery is the "best" battery for a specific home. Due to the complex nature of solar panel systems, we're unable to do any kind of hands-on testing of any of the solar batteries we review. Instead, we focus on objective ways to evaluate and compare these batteries. Here's how we evaluate solar batteries.

First, we created categories to evaluate the battery's efficiency, performance, capacity and value. We then gave each category its own weight. Each category's weight reflects the importance we felt was relevant to the average consumer. These are the categories and their weights:

• Battery modularity (stackability) - 20%
• Warranty - 20%
  
• Round-trip efficiency - 15%
  
• Depth of discharge - 10%
  
• Power output - 10%
  
• Price - 10%
  
• Customer reviews - 10%
  
• Battery capacity - 5%
  

We looked at more than 15 of the most common batteries on the market and collected the data for each category to compare the data. Each battery was given a tier-style rating (from 1 to 5) for each category to see which metrics of each battery were above average (among those on our list), average or below average.