Energy Storage Batteries: The Installer's Secret Pick

There's a home battery that most people don't know about. It comes from a Chinese company called Gotion High-tech, headquartered in Hefei. The product line is called Gotion Home.

Gotion doesn't push its residential batteries hard in the US. Walk into a solar showroom and the sales rep will point you toward a Tesla Powerwall. Browse the home energy forums and every third post mentions the Powerwall. Call an installer and ask for a quote on storage. They'll start talking about Tesla.

The Gotion Home gets left out of those conversations. And that's a shame.

Home energy storage systems are becoming essential for solar households seeking energy independence and backup power.

I've been covering residential energy storage since 2018. In that time I've seen the Powerwall go from a curiosity to the default answer for home backup. Tesla earned that position. The company built a product that works and priced it below the competition. But the market has changed. New players have entered. And some of them have built batteries that match or beat what Tesla offers.

The Gotion Home is one of those batteries. At full retail, the system runs about $12,800 installed for a 15.3 kWh configuration. The Powerwall 3 comes in at $15,400 before incentives for 13.5 kWh. The math works out to roughly $836 per kilowatt-hour for the Gotion versus $1,140 per kilowatt-hour for the Powerwall.

That's a meaningful gap.

I have another reason for writing about the Gotion Home right now. The timing matters. The 30% federal tax credit for residential battery storage ends on December 31, 2025. No phase-down. No extension. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed on July 4th cut the program almost a decade early. A system that costs $12,800 today will effectively cost $8,960 after the credit. Come January, that same system costs $12,800.

Five months from now, that $3,840 difference will be gone.

The Market Leader and Its Weakness

The Tesla Powerwall has dominated residential energy storage for a decade. Industry numbers suggest Tesla has shipped over 600,000 units worldwide since the original Powerwall launched in 2015. No other manufacturer comes close.

The Powerwall earned its position for good reasons. The integrated inverter simplified installation. The Tesla app gave homeowners real-time monitoring. The pricing undercut competitors who were charging $15,000 or more for equivalent capacity. Tesla built a product that regular people could understand and afford.

The Powerwall 3, released in 2024, pushed the specs further. The unit delivers 11.5 kW of continuous power output. That's enough to run a central air conditioner, an electric vehicle charger, and a load of laundry at the same time. The battery carries a 10-year warranty. Tesla's app shows you exactly where your energy comes from and where it goes.

But the Powerwall has a problem. You can't get one.

Tesla prioritizes its direct sales channel, leaving third-party installers with 3-6 month wait times for Powerwall units.

I spoke with installers in California, Texas, and Florida over the past two months. Every one of them reported the same thing: three to six month wait times for Powerwall 3 units. One installer in Arizona told me he had twelve customers with signed contracts and deposits, all waiting on Tesla to ship product. A contractor in Austin said he stopped quoting Powerwalls entirely because he couldn't give customers a reliable delivery date.

Tesla claims manufacturing capacity of 700,000 units per year. The company shipped roughly 200,000 in the last twelve months. Production isn't the bottleneck. Allocation is. Tesla prioritizes its direct sales channel over third-party installers. If you want a Powerwall and you want it now, you have to buy solar panels from Tesla too.

That leaves a gap in the market. Homeowners who want backup power before winter storm season. Families in wildfire zones who need storage before the next evacuation order. People who already have solar panels and just want to add a battery. Those customers need an option that's available.

A Company You Probably Don't Know

Gotion High-tech started building lithium batteries in 2006 in Hefei, Anhui Province. Back then, nobody outside the Chinese battery industry had heard of the company. For the first decade, Gotion supplied cells to electric bus manufacturers and grid storage projects across China. The business grew quietly.

In 2020, Volkswagen bought a 26% stake in Gotion for roughly $1.1 billion. The German automaker needed battery supply for its ID series electric vehicles. Gotion needed capital to expand manufacturing. The partnership made sense for both sides.

Today Gotion ranks as the fourth largest power battery manufacturer in the world. CATL holds the top spot. BYD sits at number two. LG Energy Solution takes third. Gotion shipped 15.48 GWh of batteries in the first half of 2025, capturing about 5% of the Chinese market. Most of that volume went into electric vehicles and commercial storage projects.

The residential market came later. Gotion opened a factory in Fremont, California in December 2023. The facility sits in Silicon Valley, just down the road from Tesla's main US car plant. The Fremont factory produces portable and residential storage products ranging from 3 kWh to 30 kWh. Production capacity is planned at 1 GWh annually.

I visited the Fremont facility in March 2024. The building looked more like a tech startup than a battery factory. Clean floors. Quiet assembly lines. About 85% of the production runs on automation. The staff walked me through the testing protocols. Every pack gets cycled and inspected before shipping.

The Gotion Fremont factory floor. The automation level surprised me for a facility this size.

What the Gotion Home Actually Is

The Gotion Home uses lithium iron phosphate cells. LFP chemistry. The same type Tesla uses in the Powerwall 3, the same type BYD puts in its Blade Battery, the same type powering most electric buses on the road today.

LFP batteries trade energy density for safety and longevity. A lithium nickel manganese cobalt cell packs more power into less space. An LFP cell is harder to damage, harder to overheat, and lasts more charge cycles before degradation. For a stationary battery that sits in your garage for fifteen years, those tradeoffs make sense.

The Gotion Home ships as a modular system. The base configuration includes a hybrid inverter and stackable battery modules. Each module adds 5.1 kWh of usable capacity. A three-module stack gets you to 15.3 kWh. Add more modules and you can scale up to 25.5 kWh with a single inverter.

Each module weighs about 95 pounds. Two installers can carry it. The Powerwall 3 weighs 287 pounds as a single integrated unit. That weight difference matters for wall-mounted installations and second-story placements.

The inverter handles 7.6 kW of continuous AC output. That's lower than the Powerwall 3's 11.5 kW. For most homes running normal loads during an outage, 7.6 kW is sufficient. If you're trying to run a hot tub and a welder and an electric range simultaneously, you'll want something bigger.

The Gotion Home battery stack. The modular design allows for flexible capacity configurations.

Gotion backs the system with a 10-year warranty guaranteeing 80% capacity retention after 6,000 cycles. The Powerwall 3 warranty covers 10 years with unlimited cycles but doesn't specify a retention floor. Both warranties are standard for the industry. Neither is exceptional.

The system supports both AC and DC coupling. New solar installations can wire panels directly to the inverter. Existing solar systems can connect via the AC output. This flexibility matters for the retrofit market, where homeowners want to add storage without replacing their existing inverter.

The Price Calculation

Let me walk through the actual numbers. A 15.3 kWh Gotion Home system with installation typically runs between $11,000 and $14,500 depending on your local market and electrical panel situation. Call it $12,800 as a midpoint based on quotes I've collected from installers in California and Texas.

A Tesla Powerwall 3 with 13.5 kWh of capacity lists at $15,400 before incentives according to Tesla's website. In practice, third-party installers often add markup for the hardware plus their installation labor. Quotes I've seen range from $16,000 to $19,000 depending on the installer.

On a per-kilowatt-hour basis:

Gotion Home at $12,800 for 15.3 kWh = $836/kWh

Powerwall 3 at $15,400 for 13.5 kWh = $1,140/kWh

The Gotion Home delivers 13% more storage capacity for 17% less money. The Powerwall 3 delivers more instantaneous power. Which matters more depends on your use case. For backup during grid outages, capacity usually wins. For running high-draw appliances simultaneously, power wins.

Apply the 30% federal tax credit while it still exists:

Gotion Home after credit: $8,960

Powerwall 3 after credit: $10,780

The gap narrows in percentage terms but the Gotion still comes in lower with more storage.

Installers I've talked to appreciate the Gotion Home's modular approach. Adding capacity after initial installation is straightforward.

The Deadline Problem

Here's where the timing gets urgent.

The residential clean energy tax credit expires December 31, 2025. Not reduces. Expires. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated the gradual phase-down that was supposed to run through 2034. Homeowners who install qualifying battery systems before the end of this year get 30% back. Homeowners who install on January 2, 2026 get nothing.

For a $12,800 system, that's $3,840 in lost savings.

The credit applies to the full installed cost of the battery system. Equipment, labor, permitting, electrical panel upgrades if needed. A homeowner in the 24% federal tax bracket who owes $5,000 in taxes can claim the full credit and reduce their liability to $1,160. If the credit exceeds what you owe, the excess carries forward to future tax years.

This isn't a rebate that comes back as a check. It's a reduction in your tax bill. You need to owe federal income tax to benefit. But for homeowners who do, the math is straightforward: buy before December 31 and save thousands.

The constraint now is time. Permitting takes two to four weeks in most jurisdictions. Utility interconnection approval adds another two to six weeks. Installation itself might only take a day, but the paperwork on either side stretches the timeline. Start the process in early December and you're gambling on everything going smoothly through the holidays.

Start in September or October and you have margin for delays.

The China Question

I know what some of you are thinking. A Chinese battery company. In my garage. With access to my home energy data.

The concern is understandable. US-China relations have been tense. Congress has scrutinized Chinese battery manufacturers. Some lawmakers have pushed to restrict Gotion's access to federal incentives.

Here's what I can tell you after researching the company. The Fremont factory produces batteries on American soil with American workers. The cells inside those batteries come from Gotion's Chinese facilities. The same is true for many competitors. LG sources materials from China. Samsung does too. The global battery supply chain runs through China whether we like it or not.

Volkswagen, a German automaker subject to European data privacy laws, owns more than a quarter of Gotion. The company has passed UL safety certifications required for US residential installations. The Fremont operation answers to California regulators.

Is there geopolitical risk in buying from a Chinese-owned manufacturer? Probably some. Is that risk different in kind from buying a Korean battery or a battery with Chinese cells inside? I'm not sure it is.

I'm not here to tell you what to think about US-China trade policy. I'm here to tell you there's a battery that works, costs less than the market leader, and is actually available for installation before the tax credit expires. What you do with that information is your call.

Who Should Consider This

The Gotion Home makes sense for a specific type of buyer.

If you already have a solar installation and want to add battery backup, the AC coupling capability and competitive pricing make it worth quoting alongside the other options your installer offers.

If you're installing a new solar system and your installer doesn't have Powerwall allocation, Gotion is a credible alternative that won't force you to wait until spring.

If you live in an area with time-of-use electricity rates, the capacity advantage lets you shift more consumption to off-peak hours. California's TOU rates can hit $0.50 per kilowatt-hour during peak evening hours. A larger battery stores more cheap daytime solar for expensive evening use.

If whole-home backup during extended outages is your primary concern and you need more than 13.5 kWh to get through a night, the Gotion's expandability up to 25.5 kWh gives you headroom the Powerwall doesn't offer in a single installation.

The Gotion Home is not the right choice if you're committed to the Tesla ecosystem and want everything in one app. It's not the right choice if you need more than 7.6 kW of continuous power output. It's not the right choice if your installer doesn't carry the product and would have to source it unfamiliarly.

The Installers Know

I asked six residential solar installers across three states whether they'd recommend the Gotion Home to customers who couldn't get a Powerwall in time for the tax credit deadline.

Four said yes.

One said he'd recommend it only to customers who specifically asked about alternatives to Tesla. The sixth said he hadn't worked with Gotion products yet but was planning to add them to his offerings next quarter.

One installer in the Bay Area told me he'd shifted his default recommendation from Powerwall to Gotion Home for any customer who wanted installation before year-end. "Tesla's a great product but I can't sell what I can't deliver. The Gotion ships from Fremont. I can have a system permitted and installed in five weeks. Try doing that with Tesla right now."

An installer in Houston said he'd quoted four Gotion systems in the past two months to customers who came in asking about Powerwalls. Three signed. "They wanted backup before the next hurricane season. The Gotion was available. The Powerwall wasn't. Pretty simple decision."

The Gotion Home control panel. The interface is functional rather than flashy.

What I'd Do

I'm not in the market for a home battery right now. My house has a small solar array and a natural gas backup generator. The economics don't work for my situation.

But if I were buying storage today, I'd get quotes on the Gotion Home, the FranklinWH aPower, and the Enphase IQ 5P alongside whatever Powerwall timeline my installer could offer. I'd compare total system cost, available capacity, warranty terms, and installation timeline.

If the Powerwall came back with a March delivery date and the Gotion could be in by November, I'd take the Gotion. The $3,840 tax credit savings outweigh any marginal performance difference between the two systems.

If both were available on similar timelines, I'd probably still lean toward the Gotion for the capacity advantage and the lower price per kilowatt-hour. 15.3 kWh versus 13.5 kWh matters when you're trying to run a house overnight without solar production.

Gotion isn't trying to be Tesla. They're not building humanoid robots or launching rockets or selling $100,000 cars. They make batteries. They've been making batteries for almost twenty years. The Volkswagen investment suggests the German automotive engineers saw something worth backing.

For homeowners who need storage before the tax credit disappears, who can't wait for Tesla's allocation system to sort itself out, who want a product from a company with deep manufacturing experience—the Gotion Home deserves consideration.

It won't stay a secret forever.