What types of home battery are there? All 6, from small to large

Key takeaways

• Six categories, cut on what the device does out of the box. An accessory never moves a category
• The cut between category 3 and 4 is the MPPT: its own solar inputs, so your panels go straight into the battery
• The plug only comes off at category 6. Category 5 still ships with an ordinary schuko, and passes 800 watts through it from the factory
• The cheapest kilowatt-hour sits in the middle. The whole plug-in world runs from 245 to 468 euros per kWh, category 6 from 518 to 756
• Smaller is more expensive, inside every category. The same brand asks 365 euros per kWh at 2 kWh and over 1,500 on its smallest model
• Bigger is not more efficient at rest. On a SigenStor, users measure 130 to 200 watts standby
• "3,680 W off-grid" is the specification of a socket on the appliance, not of your house
• Categories 1 through 5 move house with you. Category 6 is fixed and sells with the property

The three ground rules

Without ground rules a classification like this leaks within two paragraphs.

1. A category is what the device does out of the box. No add-ons, no accessories, no module you buy alongside. For almost everything below, something exists that lets it do slightly more. That add-on does not move the category. If every category gets an exception, there is no classification left.

2. Brands appear as examples. What is being ranked here is the category, not the box. Where a brand name appears, it is there to show that the category exists and who sits in it. It is not a recommendation.

3. One yardstick runs along, and it switches halfway. At the bottom we count in phone charges, because that is the unit these devices are sold in: a phone battery sits around 15 to 20 watt-hours. From category 3 onwards that stops working, because the subject becomes your house. There we count in nights of base load: roughly 150 watts, comfortably over 1 kilowatt-hour per night. That number comes from our own knowledge base and it varies per household. If you want to do the sums, pull your own history, and look in particular at a night when your heat pump ran. That produces a very different figure.

For calibration: an average Dutch household uses 2,430 kWh of electricity per year according to Milieu Centraal, roughly 6.7 kWh per 24 hours. A label C fridge sits at 160 kWh a year, a 7 kg washing machine at 90 kWh (label A) to 150 kWh (label E). Milieu Centraal does not split day and night and gives no base load figure; the 150 watts is ours.

Category 1: the power bank

Anker, Baseus, INIU, Ugreen, Xiaomi. Twenty to a hundred and fifty watt-hours at the top end. Up to roughly ten phone charges, which is exactly what it is for: portable watt-hours.

The boundary to the next category is not "does it have a mains socket". That assumption is wrong. There are power banks on sale with a 230 V output: Mobisun sells one at 154 Wh and 200 W, and Powkey does something comparable. So the distinction is an order of magnitude, not the connector. At 154 watt-hours and 200 watts you top up your laptop once or twice. Your fridge is out of reach.

Keep those two things apart: the brand names above carry the category, while the 230 V claim hangs on Mobisun and Powkey. Anker or Xiaomi does not automatically make a power bank with a socket.

Category 2: the portable power station

Bluetti, EcoFlow, Jackery, FossiBot, Oukitel, and another ten brands you have probably never heard of. One thousand to four thousand watt-hours, 1,800 to 3,600 watts out. In phones: sixty to well over two hundred charges.

What this category adds is an inverter and a socket of its own. Plus a display, USB ports, and on most of them a UPS-style mode so that whatever is plugged in keeps running when the grid drops.

That UPS mode needs a caveat, and the manufacturer supplies it. EcoFlow writes that a UPS for sensitive electronics has to switch over in 10 milliseconds or less, and that most power stations take 30 milliseconds or more. Per model at that brand: the DELTA 2 does 30 ms (EPS), the DELTA 3 Plus 10 ms, the DELTA Pro 3 under 10 ms. For a fridge or a laptop none of that matters. For a NAS, medical equipment or home automation it is the difference between running on and rebooting.

And then the wall. A power station feeds what you plug into it. It has no route back into your house. It cannot export into the circuit, so nothing on your consumer unit sees any of it.

The side step that is not a category: straight to DC

Before you climb any further, the cheapest move in this whole piece sits here, and it goes down rather than up.

A viewer (@scb2scb2) feeds his always-on equipment directly on DC, over USB-C from the battery. No inverter, no AC to DC and back again. Combined with efficient hardware (wifi 3 W, switch 3 W, a tuned Pi 4 at 3 W), his idle draw went from 85 watts to 38 watts.

That is not a battery trick. He skips the conversion stages for exactly those loads, and at the same time attacks the idle consumption that dominates in percentage terms when throughput is small. Anyone who does not export also stays out of the export discussion entirely: what you have then is a power station with a job.

The reason it sits here rather than with the exceptions at the bottom: it is not an accessory, it is a way of using the thing. And it is the only point in this piece that shakes you out of "bigger is better" mode before the money starts.

Category 3: the plug-in home battery

Anker, AEG, Zendure, Jackery, Growatt, Marstek, AlphaESS, SAMDUO, EcoFlow, Sunpura. Too many to list, and their core feature set is the same.

From here we stop counting in phones. This class sits at a few kilowatt-hours up to about seven, good for two to six nights of base load.

What it adds is the way back: it exports into the circuit, and therefore into your house. Not one appliance, but everything hanging off your consumer unit.

Where it stops is two things at once, and they get confused constantly.

One phase, and 800 watts on a shared circuit. That goes up as soon as you put it on a dedicated circuit, and there is a bill attached. If you have no spare circuit, count that into the price of the battery.

People here buy kilowatt-hours while their problem is kilowatts. More capacity buys longer cover, not higher. If your house pulls one and a half kilowatts and your battery supplies 800 watts of that, a second battery pack changes nothing. A second system does: two times 800 is 1,600. That distinction decides more purchases than any brand comparison.

Throughput comes on top of it. A battery earns its keep on what passes through it. Kilowatt-hours that never go round are kilowatt-hours you paid for and did not use.

If you have solar panels, in this category that power first goes through your inverter, onto the grid, and only then into the battery. If you want it direct, you are on the next category.

Category 4: the same box, with MPPT

The same class, with one thing added: its own MPPT inputs. MPPT stands for Maximum Power Point Tracker, a controller that works out, per solar input, at which point you extract the most watts from those panels.

This is the category for anyone with a few panels on a shed roof, a balcony or in the garden, or anyone who wanted to replace their inverter anyway. Here your panels go straight into the battery. It is optional, but it is possible, and it saves a conversion stage: no more detour over the grid and back.

A viewer (@dirckdevriez6661) described that route in his own words, and better than we could: "from DC panels to a DC inverter and straight into the battery without DC to AC and back to AC to DC", with four MPPT inputs and eight panels, stacking to 12 kWh.

The cut is the model, not the brand. The same manufacturers ship both, and put the difference in the type designation. Two pairs from our model overview (snapshot 2026-07-24):

To check another model yourself: search the datasheet for direct PV inputs (MC4 or MPPT), not for the words "solar panels". Almost every plug-in battery works with solar panels. Only this group takes them in directly.

And then the wall of this category, and it is a dull one: such an input handles only a limited number of panels, or a limited power. Work it through with the example from our knowledge base: 8 panels of 490 Wp across 4 MPPT inputs is roughly 980 Wp per input, just inside the margin. More panels, or more power per string, and it does not fit. However large the battery is.

Category 5: Plug-XL

Zendure SolarFlow Mix, Anker SOLIX Solarbank Max AC, Growatt AURA. Seven to eight kilowatt-hours as a base, 3.5 to 4 kilowatts. Expanded, that is seven to forty-five nights of base load.

This class has no settled name yet. We call it Plug-XL, because that describes its problem precisely: too big for your wall socket, too small for a complete system.

Because these units still come with an ordinary plug. The Zendure even has wheels, so you roll it to the meter cupboard or to a workspace where you need mobile power.

Except it runs into the same limit as category 3. Put it in any random socket and the system limits itself to 800 watts. You buy four kilowatts and you get eight hundred, until an electrician comes round.

So the power hangs on your meter cupboard, not on the battery. Three steps, and they are hard:

That limit applies to what goes out, not to what goes in. This is the part most often misread. At Anker the Solarbank Max AC leaves the factory at 800 W of export and moves to 3,500 W through the app, after you confirm it sits on a dedicated circuit. It charges at 3,500 W without you changing anything about your panels or settings. Do watch your own circuit loading while it does.

Backup power is in the box here, and read that number carefully

Categories 4 and 5 have something a category higher has to be paid for separately: backup power, built in. For the Zendure Mix series the manufacturer states 10 ms switchover and 3,680 W off-grid.

That number is the specification of the backup socket on the appliance. Not of your house. Three things make that airtight:

1. Without fixed wiring it cannot feed the house at all. A schuko exports into the circuit as long as the grid is there; once the grid drops, it may not and cannot keep exporting.
2. Without a transfer switch, nothing gets transferred. An automatic transfer switch disconnects your installation from the grid and puts the battery on it. That is not in this box.
3. Without the grid there is no measurement. During an outage your meter cupboard and the P1 port no longer report live consumption, so the system does not know what it should be feeding.

So describe it as what it is: this feeds what you plug into it. Not "the backup power does not work", because that is untrue and unfair to a product that is doing nothing wrong.

Prices, and note the distinction between the base unit and the ceiling with separate modules (Zendure Netherlands manufacturer page, 2026-08-15):

The Anker SOLIX Solarbank Max AC starts at 7 kWh and goes to 42 kWh with five expansion batteries, at 3,500 W (manufacturer page, 2026-08-15). Anker's own Dutch page lists no price, only a buy button. The figures in circulation come from reviews and web shops: work with a band of € 2,099 to € 2,499 for the main unit, with the date attached, and not with one hard number.

Category 6: the big boys

Tesla, AlphaESS, Enphase, Sigenergy, Victron, HyxiPower. And the real hybrid inverters belong here too: Growatt SPH, SolarEdge Home Hub.

A word about "hybrid", because the market uses it for two things. Hybrid means DC-coupled: panels and battery on one inverter, one conversion on the solar route. The Zendure Mix, the Anker Solarbank Max AC and the Growatt AURA are AC-coupled and are therefore never called hybrid, however hardwired they otherwise are.

This class is hardwired, on a dedicated circuit, to NEN 1010. What it adds: far more power in one go, and the ability to form a grid of its own. If the grid drops, your house keeps running, provided the transfer gear is there. On some systems you also charge your car directly on DC, without the detour through a charging point.

Since 13 August 2026 Tesla has been selling the three-phase Powerwall 3P in the Netherlands: 13.5 kWh, 15.4 kW continuous, 21 kW peak, four MPPTs, suitable for both AC and DC coupling.

And there sits the whole difference with everything below it: three phases. The heaviest model in category 5, the SolarFlow 4000 Mix Pro, takes 8 kilowatts of panels directly across two MPPTs and stays single-phase. Plug-XL expands to 50 kWh, the Powerwall 3P does 13.5. So the box with the most kilowatt-hours is not the one at the top.

At the top you no longer buy kilowatt-hours. You buy kilowatts, and you buy phases.

Bigger is not more efficient at rest

This is the point that most often runs against intuition.

A hybrid inverter of a few kilowatts has a higher standby draw than its smaller plug-in cousins. For the SPH TL3 BH-UP, Growatt states a Self-Consumption of less than 13 W in the official manual, against our own measured 5 to 8 watts on plug-in units. Just to be switched on.

At the top end it climbs further. On the SigenStor, users measure 130 to 200 watts at rest: a Dutch user on Gathering of Tweakers reports 150 to 200 W from his own measurements, and 130 to 150 W appears on r/solar. Those numbers come from users, not from the manufacturer.

What the manufacturer does confirm is the mechanism. Sigenergy documents an Energy Saving Mode in which the inverter goes to standby and the battery goes dormant when the load is low. That mode does have to be tuned to your consumption. If you skip that, the system keeps running and you lose that power out of your stored electricity. That makes it a settings question, not a fault.

There is a second layer underneath. At 200 watts, an inverter of 3 to 10 kilowatts sits so far off its efficiency curve that more is lost inside the inverter than you save. At that moment, taking 200 watts from the grid is cheaper than running 200 watts to keep the meter at zero. The largest battery on a small load is often the worse one.

Work it out per kilowatt-hour

Up to here it has been about what cannot be done. Work it out per kilowatt-hour and the ordering changes.

This band is assembled from nine brands, measured on 2026-08-15, plus a market price round on Amazon.nl of 2026-08-16 for the power stations.

So the floor sits in the middle. Growatt AURA lands at € 245 per kWh, the Zendure Mix at € 250 to € 300, the Anker Max AC around € 357, the Marstek Plug & Charge at € 468. Category 2 sits slightly above that and overlaps it. The only real jump is at category 6.

As long as you can plug it in, you pay roughly 250 to 550 euros per kilowatt-hour. Once the plug comes off, it doubles.

Smaller is more expensive, in every category

The second movement runs across the first, and it applies everywhere.

The same brand asks around € 365 per kWh at 2 kWh and over € 1,500 per kWh on its smallest model. Four times as much for the same chemistry, in a smaller box.

Same logo, same shop

One brand sits on both sides of the jump, and that rules out the easy explanation.

AEG sells a plug-in model at roughly € 370 per kWh and a high-voltage system at € 587 to € 620 per kWh. Same logo, same shop. So this is not brand positioning. It is the class.

Take the Powerwall as the sharpest example. € 7,804.50 including VAT for the 13.5 kWh base unit. If you want it to keep working when the power goes out, you need the Backup Gateway, and that sits separately on the list: € 1,028.50. A thousand euros extra for the thing that came in the box one category lower.

Except you buy something else with it, and that makes the trade an honest one. Category 5 gives you a socket that keeps working. Category 6 gives you a house that keeps working. Those thousand euros are the changeover of your entire installation.

Portable or not

There is one more difference that appears on no datasheet, and it only counts on the day you move.

Everything up to and including Plug-XL goes in the removal van. Unless you had a category 5 unit hardwired, because then it is no longer your box but the house's box.

Category 6 almost never moves. It is fixed and you sell it with the property. You can go to the trouble of taking it all out, though there is also value in what such a system does for the property in yield and savings.

Five times over, "ladder" is the wrong word

A ladder suggests that higher is better. Five times over, that is not true here.

1. The cheapest kilowatt-hour sits in the middle. Not at the top, not at the bottom, and that holds across nine brands as well as inside one brand.
2. The largest box is the worst one on a small load. The lower the load, the further the inverter sits from its efficiency curve.
3. A battery earns its keep on what passes through it. Climb higher while your consumption stays the same and you are buying idleness.
4. At the top you buy power, phases, backup and DC charging. Sort on kilowatt-hours and you are sorting on the wrong number.
5. On category 5 backup power is in the price, on category 6 it sits separately on the quote. But you buy something else with it, see above.

So higher is not better. Higher is different.

The connection

This chapter sorts nothing. A rule moves no category. But the connection does decide what comes out of your battery, and stubborn misunderstandings sit inside it.

Two numbers that need to be kept apart:

• 800 W is an export threshold. It is not a load limit of a wall socket and not a NEN figure.
• 3,680 W is 16 A × 230 V, the theoretical maximum of a circuit. The practical rule of thumb on a shared circuit sits around 2,300 W (10 A).

About NEN 1010: that standard forbids no home battery. What it does prescribe is the method of connection. Clause 551.7 requires a dedicated final circuit for an inverter running in parallel with the public grid. The old exemption for small inverters up to 2.25 A was removed with NEN 1010:2015, so the requirement applies regardless of the power exported. A shared circuit is therefore not a grey area but a deviation from the standard.

The exceptions that move no category

For almost every category some add-on exists that lets it do slightly more. They stretch a category. They do not move it, and that is why ground rule 1 is there.

• The EcoFlow Smart Home Panel 2 puts a power station (category 2) into the consumer unit after all. The product exists and the function is confirmed, including an EU set and a Dutch-language manual. We have not checked the Dutch price and availability; the texts we found are largely American (240 V, "3-ton AC"). The principle holds, the figures we leave out.
• The Anker ATS for the Solarbank Max AC gives the plug-in class a transfer arrangement. Same here: the principle is confirmed, the specifications are not online yet.

The transfer arrangement exists at every brand under a different name, incidentally: Backup Box at AlphaESS, Sigen Energy Gateway at Sigenergy, IQ System Controller at Enphase, Home Backup Interface at SolarEdge, Backup Gateway at Tesla. The question is never whether a class can do backup power. The question is whether the box is in the carton or on the quote.

What we could not stand up

Everyone publishes what they found. What follows is what we looked for and could not stand up, with the route to settling it. These points are absent from the video for that reason: a viewer cannot check a spoken figure.

The price of the Marstek Venus E 3.0 (5.12 kWh). Three sources, three amounts: € 1,899 including VAT at a comparison site, from € 1,070.25 excluding VAT (about € 1,295 including) at a web shop, and € 1,199 to € 1,299 in our own snapshot of 2026-07-24. That comes to € 253 against € 371 per kWh for the same model. marstek.nl, its English variant and iotdomotica all three returned HTTP 403, so the manufacturer price is unconfirmed. What would settle it: one reachable manufacturer price page, or a purchase receipt. Not load-bearing for this piece: the price band rests on nine brands.

The maximum of the Powerwall expansion. Each Expansion Unit would add 13.5 kWh, up to 94.5 kWh. That figure comes from a comparison site. The trade press reports cover only 13.5 kWh and the 27 kWh configuration with Gateway (€ 15,004 including VAT). The principle of stacking is established, the maximum is not. What would settle it: Tesla's own Dutch configurator, which returned HTTP 403 on 2026-08-15.

The installation cost of a Powerwall in the Netherlands. € 1,500 to € 2,500 for the fitting, € 9,500 to € 12,500 all in, exclusively from comparison sites. A signal, not evidence. What would settle it: two real quotes from certified installers, with the line items broken out.

The EPS power of the single-phase Growatt. For the three-phase TL3 BH-UP it is in the official manual (4,000 to 10,000 W, switchover under 10 ms). For the single-phase BL-UP no EU datasheet exists yet, and a forum post about a different series is not a source. What would settle it: the EU datasheet, once Growatt publishes it.

The Dutch price and availability of the EcoFlow Smart Home Panel 2, and the specifications of the Anker ATS. See above. Both exist, and for both the Dutch figures are missing.

Micro-inverters inside the battery itself. The brand and the model are settled: the Enphase IQ Battery 5P. Enphase calls it an all-in-one, AC-coupled storage system with 5.0 kWh of usable capacity, six built-in grid-forming micro-inverters and a continuous output of 3.84 kVA. What the page does not say is whether that split improves efficiency on a small load. That touches point 2 above, and it is why this item stays here. There is no Dutch price on the page either, so we have not checked the price. What would settle it: a price from a distribution partner, plus a measurement of our own on part load.

And one claim that deliberately does not appear here, because its problem is not sourcing but reading. Manufacturers in this category like to print an efficiency of around 90% on the datasheet. Such a percentage is almost always an inverter efficiency in one direction, not there and back. Our own measured band on plug-in units is 83 to 88%, with the measurement conditions attached: measured on units charging from the grid, read out after the battery, from meter values rather than from an app. This applies to no single brand in particular. It applies to efficiency, cycles, power and switchover time at once: what a seller prints on a datasheet is the best result from a lab test.

Transparency

This article was written from manufacturer pages, trade press, two measurements of our own and our own knowledge base. Nothing was paid for this piece, no brand saw it in advance, and there are no affiliate links in it.

Worth stating plainly: the Zendure units we use as measuring equipment (SolarFlow 2400 PRO and 2400 AC+) were supplied free of charge by Zendure at the time for a review. They appear here as an example of a category, not as a recommendation, and the Zendure amounts come from the public Dutch product page.

Prices shift every quarter. Every amount above is from 15 and 16 August 2026. The Powerwall 3P was two days old on the market at the time of the fact check, and its figures come from the trade press because Tesla's own Dutch page returned HTTP 403. Re-verification of this article is scheduled for 15 November 2026.

What this article does not do: it gives no verdict per household and no payback time. There is no best category. There is a category where your consumption stops, and that number comes out of your meter cupboard rather than out of this piece. Measure your own base load, and measure your heaviest winter hour alongside it.

Buying more than your house can take gives you no reserve. Only a more expensive version of the same thing.

Further reading

• How does a home battery work? on the route one kilowatt-hour travels, and where the losses sit
• Home battery too big? The honest explanation on why more capacity usually adds nothing
• Trading with a plug-in home battery on arbitrage, and why that differs from the imbalance market
• End of net metering 2027 on the date every yield question has to sit on the right side of

All prices are from 15 and 16 August 2026 and shift every quarter. If you arrive at something different, or spot an error, let us know. This article will be updated with the date attached.