Almost every customer arrives with the same question, and almost every answer they have been given elsewhere is a price rather than a reason. So here is the reasoning.
The difference in one line
A daytime system has no battery. It runs your load straight from the panels while the sun is up, and does nothing after sunset or during an outage. A hybrid system adds a lithium battery and an inverter that can charge it, so the house keeps running in the evening and through load shedding.
For the same panel capacity, a hybrid system costs roughly twice what a daytime system costs. The battery is the difference, and the battery is usually the most expensive single item in a solar installation.
The question that decides it
Not "how big is my bill" but "when do I actually use power?"
Walk through a normal day. If the heavy consumption is in daylight — a shop that opens at nine, an office, a house running air conditioning through the afternoon, a tube well, a workshop — then a daytime system takes the largest bite out of your bill for the least money. You are generating exactly when you are consuming, which is the ideal case, and there is no battery to replace in eight years.
If what you resent is the dark at eight in the evening, or the fan stopping during load shedding, then no amount of panel capacity fixes it. Only a battery does. Buying a daytime system in the hope that it will help with load shedding is the single most common mistake we are asked to undo, and undoing it means replacing the inverter.
What a daytime system will not do
It will not run anything when the grid is down. This surprises people, so it is worth being plain: when the grid fails, a daytime inverter shuts off even in bright sunshine. It has to. Feeding power into a dead line would endanger anyone working on it, so the inverter is built to disconnect. Without a battery there is nothing else to supply the house.
What a hybrid system actually does
While the sun is up it feeds your load first, then charges the battery with whatever is spare. After sunset it draws from the battery down to whatever reserve you have set, then falls back to the grid. If the grid is down it simply keeps going.
You can tell it how much battery to hold back for outages. In an area with long load shedding that setting matters more than another panel.
Can you start daytime and add a battery later?
Only if the inverter was chosen for it. A daytime inverter cannot charge a battery — it is not a setting, the hardware is not there. Adding storage later means buying a new inverter and writing off the old one.
If there is any chance you will want a battery within a few years, say so at the survey. We will quote a hybrid inverter and you can add the battery when you are ready. It costs more now and less in total.
A rough way to decide
- Most of your use is between 9am and 5pm, and load shedding is not your main complaint → daytime.
- You want light, fans and a fridge through the evening and through outages → hybrid.
- You are not sure, or your habits may change → hybrid inverter now, battery later.
What we would ask you
Before quoting we want a room-by-room list of what you run and roughly when. That is what sizes the inverter and, if you are having one, the battery. Our load calculator does this arithmetic from the appliances you own, and a sales engineer prepares the quotation from it.
There is more detail on both arrangements on our hybrid systems and daytime systems pages, including the models we fit and how to size each one.