LG ESS Home 8 Review: A Large Home Battery That Packs Power – CNET

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The battery modules and inverter fit nicely inside the battery cabinet.&nbsp;

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The battery’s state of charge can be viewed from the app or on the outside of the battery cabinet.

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5.8

LG ESS Home 8

The home battery market is full of companies you’ve never heard of, and batteries can be expensive. Then there’s the LG ESS Home 8.

Performance and efficiency 

We’ve seen batteries with worse performance specifications than the Home 8, but we’ve also seen some with much worse. 

First, let’s talk about round-trip efficiency. This is essentially a measure of how much energy actually makes it into storage without getting lost along the way. The LG ESS Home 8’s round-trip efficiency is marked at 90%, about average for residential lithium-ion home batteries. 

A battery’s depth of discharge is the amount of energy you’re actually able to use from the battery relative to its maximum capacity. Another way to look at it is the manufacturer’s limit on the amount of energy you can safely drain from your battery without damaging it. The Home 8 uses that “blocked-off energy” as a sort of safety cushion for when the power goes out and your battery is empty.  

“We’ve built in the hard floor so nobody can kill the battery,” Brown said. “Because we built in the floor and have reserve capacity, the Home 8 will wake up every two hours and look for juice.”

And while this is a cool feature, it still limits the amount of energy that you could have access to on a daily basis. The actual capacity of the Home 8 is 15.8 kWh, but you’ll only be able to use 14.4 kWh. We found the average depth of discharge for these types of batteries to be at about 95%. The Home 8 falls a bit lower, at 91%. 

A battery’s continuous power output is the amount of power it’s able to handle at any given moment without causing damage. The higher the power output, the more of your house it can run at once. 

The Home 8 is pretty powerful. Discharging, the battery is able to run a continuous output of 7.5 kW. However, while charging the Home 8’s power is a bit lower, at 5.4 kW. It’s definitely not the strongest battery on the market, but it’s still solid.  

“More power means starting larger loads and/or running more loads at a given time,” Brown said. “And so that’s why we went with the 7.5 [kW].”

Warranty

The LG ESS Home 8 warranty is pretty standard in comparison to the rest of the industry. The battery’s expected throughput (59.8 MWh) is a bit higher than other batteries, which is nice to see. Here’s a quick warranty breakdown.

Years: This is the number of years your battery is warranted for. The Home 8’s warranty expires after 10 years, which is the industry standard for batteries.

Throughput: This is the expected total amount of energy the battery will provide during its lifetime, as determined by the manufacturer, in megawatt-hours. Once your battery hits its listed throughput, in this case 59.8 MWh, your warranty expires. It doesn’t matter how many years you have left on your warranty.

Capacity guarantee: Batteries will develop capacity retention issues over time. The capacity guarantee is the manufacturer’s guarantee that your battery will be able to retain a certain percentage of its usable capacity by the time your warranty expires. LG Electronics guarantees that the Home 8 will be able to hold at least 70% of its original usable capacity by the end of your warranty.

Customer support

We’ve found that most battery manufacturers seem to struggle with providing good customer service. LG Electronics is no different. However, LG Electronics doesn’t just make home batteries. LG is one of the largest manufacturers of consumer goods and electronics in the world, with LG Electronics being a household name, so most of the company’s customer reviews are for its other products. Online customer reviews from LG Electronics’s Better Business Bureau and Trustpilot pages are unfavorable.

Frequent pain points of LG Electronics customers are the short lifespan of the company’s appliances and unsatisfactory customer support, according to customer reviews from Better Business Bureau. Customers who left reviews on the company’s Trustpilot page expressed similar concerns about poor customer service and malfunctioning household appliances.

We also want to point out that while online customer reviews can be a good place to start your research about a company’s service, online reviews should also be read with a grain of salt.  

LG ThinQ app

If you choose to install the LG ESS Home 8, you’ll also gain access to the LG ThinQ app. You’ll be able to monitor your home’s energy consumption, view your energy data and take advantage of the Home 8’s various operating modes. 

The Home 8 has three operating modes: Backup, Time of Use and PV Self Consumption. Backup mode is helpful for when the power is out, while Time of Use and PV Self Consumption modes can help optimize your energy usage and avoid high electricity rates. You can also connect other LG appliances and electronics to the app as well. It’s almost like building an LG ecosystem in your house.