Alpha ESS Battery Review: An Unforgettable Installation Experience

I have had jobs where everything hooked up well enough, but I struggled to commission them, and of course, that’s always at 4pm when the tech support call centre has hung up the headset. The instructions, in quaint English, printed in tiny text with pages upside down, weren’t particularly useful. When I returned and finally got the tech line to answer (*hot tip: ring them when you’re at least 10 minutes away from the job), they ran me through a procedure or two, but to no avail. Then they sent me “the email”, which mashed together four different troubleshooting procedures.

So the most memorable one was finally made to work, but only after cutting a comms plug off, changing the wiring and misnaming the battery in the commissioning app. Without these modifications, the unit was effectively dead on arrival. But hey, it was cheap, and it could just about manage to run the lights and the fridge! The kettle though; that was out of the question.

Other installs of different models have gone more or less ok but again struggled to commission with an unclear choice of phone apps and poor WiFi connectivity. I can only hope they’re making things better.

Aesthetics and Design

Design-wise, Alpha ESS batteries are sleek and tidy, with a removable cover that offers ease of service. However, some nuances, like removing the protective film, can be tedious. So tedious that I always advised the customer to do it themselves.

We did once field a novel complaint. The battery level indicator, which will flash its green LEDs continuously under normal operation, was reflecting off the side fence at night, and this could be seen through the house window. We considered mailing him a piece of black tape to cover the light…

This is a partially installed Alpha ESS. The weight of the battery anchors it while you make fixings. One good point is that the space behind the all-encompassing cover allows you to remove a whole brick for cabling and conduits if needed.

Sunpower And Alpha In A Tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G

Curiously, it seems that the long-term and outright leader in solar PV panel technology – with the highest efficiency, longest warranty and most reassuringly expensive list price – Sunpower –  has partnered with Alpha ESS for their first Sunpower Battery. How the SunPower One product from Maxeon measures up, I will be very interested to know. From my perspective, it’s like fitting a Rolls-Royce with Russian truck tyres, so we’ll have to wait and see.

The Alpha ESS SMILE5

There are a few Alpha-ESS product lines in Australia, and I’ve picked the SMILE5. This is an all-in-one unit, which includes batteries, a battery management system (BMS) and an inverter, but they’re discreet components behind a single cover. As a 48-volt nominal system, Alpha even claim they are compatible with DC coupling, but I haven’t seen an MPPT solar regulator added to one for solar panel connections.

The battery modules used in this unit are LFP chemistry, so they’re a safe type of lithium-ion battery technology. The battery modules for AlphaESS come from another Chinese company, EVE, which has been in the battery business since 2001. The 13kWh battery units are quite big and heavy monoliths, so while they come with nice handles, you must have two people to handle them.

The Alpha ESS SMILE 5 has a 10-year product warranty on the batteries, but the rest of the system only has five years. If you’d like to download the specific warranty documents, there are no fewer than 19 options to choose from once you’ve filtered the results. There are a truly maddening number of variations in model nomenclature.

This alpha still requires an external DC solar isolator and time-consuming customisation of mountings to cope with real-world walls and floors.

The performance warranty for Alpha ESS solar batteries guarantees a minimum of 80% of their original capacity after 10 years (assuming the system is connected to the internet and is only used for self-consumption). If the system is not internet-connected, the warranty plummets to three years. And if it’s configured for anything apart from self-consumption, the warranty is also compromised. So, while it might be technically compatible with some Virtual Power Plant (VPP) programs, the warranty will expire earlier. Be careful.

As for how strong the warranty backing is, we’re aware of a situation where an Australian customer battled for months with Alpha ESS over a Storion OF5 warranty claim. This resulted in the owner sending a letter of complaint to the ACCC and Office of Fair Trading.

Weighing Up The Alpha ESS Experience

Alpha ESS has stirred quite a storm in the realm of home batteries, especially with their SMILE5 series here in Australia. While its design aesthetics and offerings can be tempting, my experience and mixed feedback from other professionals paints a complex picture.

If you’re a long-term Alpha-ESS battery owner, we’d really appreciate you telling us about your experience by clicking the button on this Alpha ESS Reviews page.

Alpha ESS: Technical Specs

• Nominal capacity: 5kW
• Surge rating: 5kW
• Solar capacity: 7.5kW
• PV current input: 15a nominal – 18a short circuit
• Warranty: 5 years
• Usable Capacity:  13.3kWh
• Battery warranty: 80% remaining capacity at 10 years – 38.836Mwh throughput – (*8000 cycles?)
• Throughput limit @ 1 full cycle per day: 8 years
• Approx retail: $11385 inverter & battery + installation
• $-per-usable-kWh: $856
• $-per-warranted-kWh :$0.29 @ 1 cycle per day / $0.146 @ 2 cycles per day (*8000 @ 2/day = 11 years)