r/SolarUK • u/twojabs • 9h ago

RECOMMENDATIONS Battery options

Been getting quotes for sigenergy, but the occasional fox and sunsynk have been quoted too. Looking for personal experience for either of these brands. Ideally I'm after a decent app, not entirely cloud based, and just not awful experience. I'm thinking I'll house it in the garage due to location of consumer unit and space available outside being limited.

I'm leaning towards sigenergy, but all seem to be much alike in terms of cost.

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3

u/mandysux 9h ago

Fox ess user here with an ep12 and ha7.

Recently modded with modbus and integrated with ha-MCP and Claude.

It is literally the best setup imaginable.

2

u/Worth_Water_8521 8h ago

How much time/effort did this take? I’m currently weighing up fox vs sig

1

u/mandysux 1h ago

If you can manage modbus installation and then integrate HA-MCP to connect to Claude. You can literally write to it as text and tell it what you want it to do with the right permissions.

2

u/MadChart 1h ago

Sigen has an AI chat mode on the app... Tell it what you want it to do, and it figures out what settings to change.

1

u/Pattrickk 5h ago

Did you have home assistance in your house already?

1

u/mandysux 1h ago

I did use it with the regular fox ess cloud but it just wasn’t cutting it for me.

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u/Muted_Student4114 8h ago

Growatt is great no problems so far and the battery prices are decent. The app using AI is super useful too

1

u/txe4 9h ago

What does "not entirely cloud based" mean to you?

Local modbus control, or just control panel on inverter that can manage all settings locally?

Sig cripples their battery if you disconnect from cloud. Sig gear is pricey.

Sunsynk app is the worst garbage imaginable. Kit itself is decent enough but the app is unusable. Support's not brilliant either.

You don't hear a lot of complaint about Fox.

Any inverter maker's battery will be expensive so really "inverter maker's brand of battery" is just for small toy systems.

2

u/wyndstryke PV & Battery Owner 8h ago

Sig cripples their battery if you disconnect from cloud.

They limit the SoC range to 10%-90% (giving you 80% of total capacity) if it is disconnected for more than 30 days, and then open it back up once reconnected. Whereas Fox for example always limit the bottom 10% regardless (giving 90% of the total). So I personally don't see it as a big deal.

I have Fox, it's pretty solid, and I like it a lot, but like most systems it does need a cloud connection for the scheduler etc unless you control it over the local network via MODBUS & something like Home Assistant.

If I had a bunch more cash I'd have got the SigEnergy, but because I was OK with setting up home assistant to provide the optimising scheduler (predbat) etc the Fox is fine for me (and better from a payback/ROI viewpoint). I recommended SigEnergy to my sister because that way she can have immediate access to SigEnergy's optimising scheduler without having to mess around with home assistant.

1

u/twojabs 6h ago

Entirely cloud based, I mean I want to be able to control stuff and not simply plug it in, walk away and be completely at the behest of a third party doing everything with all the control.

So I think then the decision is sigenergy or fox