A home battery inside Chichester's walls, and outside them

Chichester is twenty-one miles west along the A27 and the city our telephone number belongs to — 01243 is the Chichester code. For a battery it is two cities. Inside the walls, a conservation area covers the historic core within the Roman street plan and the listed-building count is high. Outside them, the post-war and modern detached houses on the estates and in the villages round the harbour are some of the simplest battery jobs on the patch.

Inside the walls: the cellar

A Georgian townhouse has thick walls, a cellar more often than not, and no garage. PAS 63100:2024 — the fire-safety specification home batteries have been installed to since April 2026 — cares about location, clearances and detection, and a dry cellar often gives all three: cool, out of the living space, with room around the stack. The survey checks two more things before it agrees. The cable route to the consumer unit, which in a tall house can be long. And whether the detection the specification asks for can be fitted where it needs to be.

The listed question, asked first

Where the house is listed, the position of a stack and the route of its cables can touch listed building consent even though the outside of the building is untouched. We do not guess at that. We put a drawing to the conservation officer before we quote, which costs you nothing and settles it either way. A battery is often the part of a system that can go ahead inside the walls when a visible roof cannot — the roof conversation is on solar panels in Chichester.

Outside the walls: the garage wall

The detached houses on the estates north of the bypass and in the villages round the harbour have a garage or a utility, a solid wall and a board within a sensible run. That is the straightforward job: position agreed in a minute, the real work in the sizing.

Sizing on a shaded plain

The coastal plain is flat and open, so shade here comes from mature trees and neighbouring roofs rather than terrain, and a shaded roof often means a smaller array than the house could otherwise take. That is the house where a battery earns more, not less: a smaller array exports a bigger share of what it makes unless there is somewhere to put the surplus. We size from half-hourly consumption or bills and model the shade on the roof, and the two halves are quoted as one system. If the sums do not support a battery, you are told.

The operator: SSEN

PO18 and PO19 are Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, grid supply point group H on the 15 October 2026 lookup — not UK Power Networks like the coast east of Worthing. An inverter up to 16 amps per phase is notified to SSEN under G98; anything larger is a G99 application before it is energised, and we plan the job around SSEN’s response time rather than waiting on it. Domestic solar panels and battery storage currently attract zero-rate VAT, so the quote has no VAT line.

Where to go next

Battery storage in Chichester is the page for the whole job. East along the coast, Littlehampton’s post covers the flats and the leasehold question; inland, the home patch under the Downs covers the outbuilding battery, also on SSEN. The county picture is on the battery storage page; the lines we fit are compared in Sigenergy vs Fox ESS vs Hanchu.