The five things every customer should hear
1. The percentage is the fuel gauge. “That number on the screen is your battery. Watch it for a week and you’ll know your house’s rhythm.” Where the number lives: Display Walkthrough. 2. Hours depend on what’s running. “A battery is a bucket — big loads empty it fast. The essentials we wired give you your evening; add a heater and it’s a fraction of that.” No fixed hours promised; the load decides. 3. It may stop on purpose — that’s protection, not failure. “The system keeps a floor under the battery. On grid it may hold some charge in reserve for outages, and at a low floor it stops discharging to protect itself — then recharges. That pause is design, not a defect.” (The thresholds behind that sentence are configured per the platform settings page — say what this site is set to do.) 4. Grid charging only if we set it. “By default this system prefers solar. If you want the battery topped up from the grid before outage-heavy evenings, that’s a setting we enable deliberately — tell us and Kent configures it.” (On the Kent M1, grid-charge ships disabled — enabling it is a conscious design choice.) 5. After a long outage, let it recover. “If a long cut runs the battery to its floor, let the system recharge it promptly — don’t leave it flat for days, and don’t switch the system off with an empty battery.” [KNB-VAL-20 — the confirmed recharge window will be published; until then: promptly]Battery-friendly habits (the card version)
- Glance at the SOC now and then; know your evening number.
- Report a battery alarm with a photo — don’t power-cycle repeatedly.
- Don’t stack cartons against the pack or block its ventilation.
- Leaving the house for weeks? Tell Kent — the right idle configuration exists for that.
What not to promise
- Fixed backup hours — the load decides; give a lights-and-fans illustration instead.
- “It will never stop” — protection floors exist precisely to stop it, briefly.
- A DIY settings tour — thresholds are installer/Kent territory; the customer’s control is the phone call.
Common mistakes
- Promising the nameplate kWh as usable every night, ignoring reserve floors.
- Leaving grid-charge at default on an outage-first home without telling the customer the battery may be empty when the first evening cut lands.
- Explaining thresholds in percent-jargon instead of “it saves some for emergencies”.