Will a Home Battery Fill Up in Winter? Lincoln Solar Output, Month by Month

ElectriFusion Solutions · 15 October 2026

The question behind most battery enquiries from Lincoln is simple: how much of the day's solar will the battery actually catch? The answer swings so far through the year that an annual figure hides it. Here is the whole year for a south-facing roof in Lincoln, from the European Commission's PVGIS model.

A 4.85 kW array in Lincoln, every month

PVGIS 5.2, SARAH2 radiation database, Lincoln town-centre coordinates, south-facing at 35°, 14% system losses, fetched 15 October 2026. Annual total 4,933 kWh (1,017 kWh per kW), about 3.8% more than Doncaster. Modelled averages, not a guarantee for any particular roof.

The best month here is May at 611 kWh (19.7 kWh a day) and the worst is Dec at 170 kWh (5.5 kWh a day), a ratio of 3.6 to one; that ratio, not the annual total, is what a battery has to live with.

For scale: PVGIS puts the in-plane irradiation on that roof at about 1,249 kWh per square metre a year, and the array converts it to 1,017 kWh per installed kilowatt; a Lincoln household with the regional average evening load would see the battery cycle fully on about 245 days a year on these figures.

What that means for the battery

A 5 kWh battery wants roughly 5 kWh of surplus after the house has taken what it uses during the day. On the PVGIS averages, a Lincoln roof clears 10 kWh a day in Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, so those are the months a 5 kWh battery fills from the roof on an ordinary day. A 10 kWh battery needs about 16 kWh a day of generation to fill from solar alone, which this roof averages in Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug.

From November to January the average is 6.3 kWh a day. A house that runs a fridge, a router, a kettle and some lighting through the day uses most of that as it arrives, so the battery sees a few hundred watt-hours of surplus, not five kilowatt-hours. That is not a fault with the battery or the panels; it is the latitude.

That something else is the grid

On a time-of-use tariff the battery charges in the cheap overnight window and discharges into the evening peak, every day of the year, solar or not. In the dark months that is the whole of its job in Lincoln; in summer it is a top-up, because the roof has already filled it. The saving is the rate gap times the kilowatt-hours shifted, so ask for the tariff's night and peak rates before the battery's brochure.

Count each day once. A battery that filled overnight has no room for the morning's solar surplus, so on a summer day the saving is the solar or the tariff, not both added together.

So what size for a Lincoln home?

The evening load decides it. Pull a week of half-hourly smart-meter data: if the house uses 4 to 6 kWh between dusk and midnight, 5 kWh is the size; an EV or heat pump pushes it to 10 kWh, and in Lincoln that larger unit is working for the overnight tariff more than for the roof. Registration with the network, standalone options and the models we fit are on battery storage Lincoln; the solar side is on solar panels in Lincoln.

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