Home Battery Backup in Norfolk

Because it is required to. A grid-tied inverter must disconnect when it loses the utility, so that it is not energising lines that crews believe are dead. That is anti-islanding, it is a safety requirement rather than a product limitation, and it applies to every grid-tied array on the street. Dominion Energy's net metering page states the consequence directly: supplying your home during an outage takes an energy storage system and a transfer switch. Adding a battery and the right switching is what changes the behaviour.

The residential code permits a defined set of locations for stationary storage and excludes others outright — habitable rooms and sleeping rooms among them. On a coastal lot a second filter applies on top of the code one: the permitted location also has to be somewhere that does not take water. A garage slab that floods, a crawl space, and the low side of a lot are all places where a code-permitted installation is still the wrong installation. The siting checker on this site walks the code side; the elevation side is a site visit.

That depends on what is on the critical load panel and whether solar is recharging the battery each day, and nobody can answer it from a postcode. A battery with a full charge and no recharge is a fixed quantity of energy being drawn down by whatever circuits were connected to it. In a multi-day tropical outage the recharge question dominates: a battery paired with a working array can carry a reduced household indefinitely in clear weather, and the same battery on its own is measured in hours to days. We size to a list of circuits you choose, and we do not put a runtime figure on a web page.

Dominion's residential path runs in four steps: a Net Metering Interconnection Notification submitted by you or your vendor, a contingent approval after a compatibility review that both parties sign, certification by a licensed Virginia electrician or approval by the local inspection authority, and finally permission to operate once metering and billing are in place. Nothing may run in parallel with the grid before that last step. It is the same permission-to-operate gate that governs solar, and it is where projects sit waiting when the paperwork was treated as an afterthought.

They fail differently, which is the useful way to compare them. A generator needs fuel delivered or stored and mechanical service it rarely gets, and it does not help with anything except outages. A battery is silent, starts instantly, needs no fuel and can do other work the rest of the year, but it holds a finite amount of energy unless something recharges it. In a region whose outages are measured in days rather than hours, that recharge question is the deciding one, and for many houses the answer is solar plus storage rather than either alone.

Programs change and they have to be checked against your address, your utility account and the date the equipment is placed in service rather than taken from an article. Federal residential energy credit rules changed for property placed in service after December 31, 2025. Seamless Home does not provide tax advice and does not quote an incentive we have not confirmed for your project.

Seamless Home is the licensed contractor of record on the work it runs. Installation is performed by vetted installing partners engaged as our subcontractors, which means the permit, the inspection and the correction notice have one name on them. Coverage is confirmed per service area rather than promised as blanket availability.