A wall-mounted battery should fit the way your household uses electricity, not just its total monthly bill. Check recent bills and note your daily kilowatt-hour use, then identify the circuits you want during an outage. A refrigerator, internet router, lights, and a medical device create a different demand than whole-home heating. Be specific. Write down the appliances and their approximate running times.
Capacity, measured in kilowatt-hours, tells you how much energy a battery stores. Output, measured in kilowatts, tells you how many appliances it can run at once. These figures are not interchangeable. Estimate the energy for your essential loads over the hours you want backup, then allow for conversion losses and any reserve the system keeps. For example, a refrigerator may cycle on and off, so its nameplate rating alone can overstate its daily use. Real life varies.
Solar production, evening routines, and local outages also affect the right size. If panels often leave surplus energy, storage may capture more of it; winter output may be lower. Avoid buying capacity based on a single unusually high-use month. That can lead to an oversized system and unnecessary expense. Check whether the proposed battery can supply your peak load, and confirm wall strength, clearances, and installation requirements with a qualified professional. A modest capacity estimate may still miss future needs. Revisit it if you plan to add an electric vehicle or heat pump.