Battery Storage Richmond

Richmond upon Thames is a borough of owners: at the 2021 Census 62.4% of households owned their home, 24.7% rented privately and 12.1% rented from a social landlord. That matters because a battery is fixed to the building, so the owner decides where it goes. In the Edwardian semis and villas of East Sheen and St Margarets, the usual spots are a garage wall, a utility room or an understairs cupboard close to the consumer unit. The loft is the place people suggest first and we suggest last: summer heat, awkward access for servicing and fire-safety guidance on where storage can sit all count against it. A Georgian or Victorian mid-terrace on Richmond Hill or in North Sheen has no side passage, so the unit goes inside, near the meter, with the cable route agreed before anything is drilled.

If you own a flat, the first step is consent: a leaseholder needs the freeholder's agreement before anything is fixed to the structure or the wiring is changed beyond the flat, and the borough's private renters, nearly a quarter of households, need the landlord's. Inside a flat a compact unit in a utility cupboard can work, but a shared hallway or stairwell is never where we would put one. In Richmond's conservation areas, keep the battery indoors or on a rear wall out of public view. On a listed building, Richmond Council's own solar guidance already requires listed building consent as well as planning permission for panels, so treat anything fixed to historic fabric with the same caution and speak to the council before work is planned.

The town centre sits in UK Power Networks' South Eastern Power Networks licence area, but Richmond is close to the edges of two other licence areas, so check your own address with UK Power Networks' postcode checker rather than assuming. Whoever runs your cables, a battery connects through an inverter and the operator treats it like generation. If the whole system's output is 16 A per phase (3.68 kW) or less, the installer notifies the operator under G98, before commissioning or within 28 days of it; anything larger needs a G99 application approved before work starts. UK Power Networks says it approves applications automatically where the maximum export, after any export limit, is under 5 kW.

A standard grid-tied battery shuts down in a power cut, along with any solar panels, so that nothing is fed into cables engineers may be working on. Keeping lights, a fridge or broadband running needs backup designed in from the start: a backup-capable inverter and selected circuits wired to it. With 6,425 privately kept plug-in vehicles across Richmond upon Thames, we are often asked whether a battery will charge the car during a cut. On a standard system it will not, and even with backup, a home battery is sized for the house's evening load, not to fill a car. Tell us at the survey if outage cover matters to you and we will price it as a separate line.

Ofgem's reported 2024/25 figures for South Eastern Power Networks show about 42.2 supply interruptions per 100 customers and about 30.4 minutes lost per customer over the year, against 39.7 and 35.1 across Great Britain (central Richmond only — check your postcode with the network operator if you live near the edge of the area). Source: Ofgem — RIIO-2 Electricity Distribution: annual report 2024 to 2025, supplementary datafile, sheet "Ch2 outputs - reliability" (CI and CML performance, planned and unplanned).