Once you've decided a home battery makes sense, the next question is which one. It's a good question, and the honest answer is that there's no single best battery for every home. The right choice depends on your solar setup, how much you want to store, and what you want the battery to do. Two names come up most often for North Bay homes: Tesla Powerwall and Enphase, and they're the two we recommend and install most.
Here's how they compare, and how we help you choose.
First, what a home battery does
Whichever one you pick, a home battery does the same core job. It stores the solar your panels make during the day so you can use it later, in the expensive evening hours or during an outage, instead of pulling from the grid. If you want the fuller picture on that, our post on how battery storage powers your evenings and outages walks through it. The differences between batteries are about how they're built and how they fit your system, not what they're for.
Tesla Powerwall
The Powerwall is one of the most recognized home batteries on the market, and for good reason. It's a high-capacity unit that stores a lot of energy and delivers high power output, which makes it well-suited to backing up a good portion of a home. Many households cover their needs with a single Powerwall, and you can add more for larger homes or bigger backup goals.
The Powerwall leans toward the whole-home approach. Its strong output means it can run heavier loads, and Tesla's app is polished and easy to live with. For a homeowner who wants a straightforward, high-capacity battery with a familiar name behind it, the Powerwall is an excellent choice, and often our recommendation.
Enphase
Enphase takes a different, modular approach, and it's a great fit for many homes, especially those already built around Enphase microinverters. Instead of a single large unit, Enphase batteries come in smaller building blocks that you combine to reach the capacity you want. That makes it easy to size storage precisely and to start smaller and add later.
Because Enphase batteries work hand in hand with Enphase microinverters, they slot neatly into that ecosystem, with everything panels and battery reporting through one app at the panel level. If your system uses Enphase microinverters, or you prefer to scale your storage in smaller increments, Enphase is often the natural pick. It's the other battery we most frequently recommend.
How to choose between them
Both are top-tier, reliable batteries with strong warranties and good monitoring, so you're in good shape with either. The choice usually comes down to a few things:
- Your existing system. If you have or want Enphase microinverters, an Enphase battery keeps everything in one ecosystem. Other setups pair well with a Powerwall.
- How much you want to store, and how you want to grow. Enphase makes it easy to size in smaller steps and expand later. The Powerwall packs a lot of capacity and output into each unit.
- What you want to back up. If running heavier loads during an outage is a priority, the Powerwall's strong output is a real advantage. For covering everyday evening use and your key circuits, either does the job well.
There's no wrong answer here. It's about finding the right match for your home, which is exactly what we sort out with you during the design process.
One thing worth knowing: both batteries are modular in their own way, so neither locks you in for good. With Enphase, you add blocks to reach the capacity you want. With Powerwall, you add whole units. So if your needs grow later, say you add an EV or want more backup, there's a path to expand either system. That flexibility is part of why both have become so popular on North Bay homes.
What about Franklin?
You'll see a third name out there, Franklin, and we do offer it. It's a capable whole-home battery. In practice, though, it's the right fit for fewer of the homes we work on, so we more often steer homeowners toward a Powerwall or Enphase system, which tend to be the better match for most North Bay installs. If Franklin is genuinely the best option for your situation, we'll tell you. More often, one of the other two is the way to go.
We help you pick the right one
The best battery for you is the one that fits your home, your solar, and your goals, not whichever brand a salesperson is pushing that month. Because we install both Tesla Powerwall and Enphase, and know them well, we can give you a straight recommendation based on your system rather than on what we happen to carry.
During the design, we look at your existing setup, how much you use and when, and what you most want the battery to do, then match you with the right one and size it properly. If you want a refresher on sizing, we cover it in how many solar batteries you need.
We've been designing solar and battery storage systems across Marin, Sonoma, and Napa since 1984. We're 100% employee-owned; we've installed more than 9,000 systems, and we're licensed as a General Contractor (B) and Electrical Contractor (C-10). We were also one of the first companies in California to earn the state's C-46 solar license, so the team recommending your battery is the same licensed team that installs and stands behind it.
Wondering which battery is right for your home? Contact SolarCraft or call Sonoma/Napa 707.778.0568 or Marin 415.382.7717.
