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

ElectriFusion Solutions · 15 October 2026

The question behind most battery enquiries from Nottingham 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 Nottingham, from the European Commission's PVGIS model.

A 4.85 kW array in Nottingham, every month

PVGIS 5.2, SARAH2 radiation database, Nottingham town-centre coordinates, south-facing at 35°, 14% system losses, fetched 15 October 2026. Annual total 4,744 kWh (978 kWh per kW), within half a percent of Doncaster. Modelled averages, not a guarantee for any particular roof.

The best month here is May at 587 kWh (18.9 kWh a day) and the worst is Dec at 167 kWh (5.4 kWh a day), a ratio of 3.5 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 1,202 kWh per square metre a year, and the array converts it to 978 kWh per installed kilowatt; a Nottingham household with the regional average evening load would see the battery cycle fully on about 214 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 Nottingham roof clears 10 kWh a day in Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, 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 6.0 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

Winter battery value in Nottingham comes from the tariff: charge at the overnight rate, run the house through the 4pm to 7pm peak, and the roof's contribution is a bonus. In summer the roles reverse. Either way the arithmetic is the difference between the two rates multiplied by what the battery shifts in a day, which is why the tariff is the first thing we ask about.

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 Nottingham 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 Nottingham 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 Nottingham; the solar side is on solar panels in Nottingham.

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