I manage procurement for a 100-person facilities company in San Diego. Power and maintenance sits in my budget, and when the SDG&E rate increase letter arrived, I did what I do with every cost problem: I pulled old invoices, listed vendors, and tried to calculate the total cost of ownership rather than the monthly payment. That is how I ended up with a spreadsheet titled Vivint Solar San Diego vs. components. It is also how I ended up answering the same question I hear from every owner: is Vivint Solar and Sunrun the same company?
The short version: Sunrun owns Vivint Solar. According to Sunrun's October 2020 investor release, the acquisition closed in 2020. The Vivint Solar name still appears in San Diego on old contracts and in local search results, but the negotiation counterparty is Sunrun-controlled rather than the pre-2020 independent Vivint Solar. That means you are getting a quote from the same national entity that controls the solar, storage, monitoring and warranty. That does not make it automatically good or bad. It makes the vendor accountability easy to verify.
What I Actually Compared
I compare vendors, but I also compare buy paths. The first useful step was separating two very different ways to spend money.
Path A: Full-service solar plus storage. In this path, a company such as Sunrun/Vivint Solar designs the rooftop solar, installs the storage, files interconnection paperwork, and supports the system over the contract life.
Path B: Critical-load battery components. In this path, I buy an Amped Outdoors 60Ah lithium battery, a compatible NOCO lithium battery charger, fuse holders, wire, and put it on a small circuit list. This is not a solar installation. It is an off-grid style resilience tool for specific equipment.
The comparison only works if I define what the two paths are meant to do. Path A is a 20-year energy asset. Path B is a portable insurance product for a small load. Comparing them on up-front dollars alone is like comparing a warehouse backup generator to a AA battery rack. Both store energy. They do not serve the same function.
Dimension 1: Capacity and Scope
A 12-volt Amped Outdoors 60Ah lithium battery stores roughly 768 watt-hours before losses. That is a little more than three-quarters of one kWh. It will power a security DVR, a router, a few LED lights and laptop chargers for a useful amount of time. It will not power an air conditioner, electric heat, a commercial refrigerator, or a large gate motor for any practical period.
The integrated home and small commercial storage systems that companies offer today are in a different class. A typical 10-15 kWh system is fifteen to twenty times the usable capacity of a 60Ah battery. It can also start larger inductive loads and shift energy across time. The two products are not substitutes.
Conclusion for this dimension: If your site needs whole-building or whole-circuit backup for hours, Path B fails immediately. If your actual list is one rack of communication equipment, Path A is overkill. The dimension answer is about the load list, not brand loyalty.
Dimension 2: Cost Structure and Hidden Work
On paper, Path B looks far cheaper. An Amped Outdoors 60Ah lithium battery can usually be bought for somewhere in the low-to-mid hundreds of dollars, and NOCO lithium battery charger models with a LiFePO4 setting are commonly in the $50 to $100 range. Those prices are as of late 2024 from online retail listings; verify current pricing before you budget.
Path A is materially more expensive. The price also has non-obvious line items that procurement people hate. In one quote I reviewed, the storage line was under $15,000, but the critical-loads subpanel and interconnection work appeared as a $1,800 adder. That is not necessarily a red flag. It is a reminder that headline system price is not until-entire-site-operational price. Your comparison needs to include every electrical component outside the box.
Conclusion for this dimension: The cheaper path is only cheaper if it solves the problem. I have been burned by choosing the cheapest option that did not solve the problem, and the redo cost more than the correct option would have. The decision should not be Path A because it has a big brand or Path B because it has a small price.
Dimension 3: Charging and the LiFePO4 Question
If you pick Path B, the charger matters. The key phrase is NOCO lithium battery charger. Not all NOCO chargers are the same; look for the model that explicitly supports LiFePO4 or has a lithium mode. A lead-acid profile can cause the battery management system to disconnect or the charger to operate based on a bad voltage reference. In my experience, what everyone calls a dead battery is often a lithium charger protection event. The BMS is doing its job, but the charger has to be compatible.
Are all LiFePO4 batteries deep cycle?
This question comes up in almost every battery comparison. Here is the practical procurement answer.
LiFePO4 chemistry is deep-cycle-capable. Unlike older flooded lead-acid, LiFePO4 cells are routinely rated for repeated discharge to 80-100% depth-of-discharge. In that chemical sense, all LiFePO4 batteries can be considered deep-cycle. But that does not mean every product is engineered and warrantied for the same duty cycle.
The difference sits in the BMS and the specification sheet. Will the BMS disconnect on low temperature? What is the continuous charge current? What is the continuous discharge current? What depth-of-discharge was used for the cycle-life rating? You should ask these questions for any battery, including the Amped Outdoors 60Ah lithium battery. Good vendors publish those limits. If a seller only gives you amp-hours and a sticker saying deep-cycle, ask for more.
Conclusion for this dimension: All LiFePO4 batteries are deep-cycle in chemistry; not all are deep-cycle in the sense of an engineered product with a documented cycle life. Buy the spec sheet, not the label.
Dimension 4: San Diego Rates and the New Utility Rules
San Diego is not the easiest market to buy solar in anymore, and that is not a criticism. The old playbook was simple: install panels, export the excess solar energy, and get a credit on your bill. Under Net Energy Metering 3.0, the rules changed, and export credits are much lower than under previous tariffs. According to the CPUC (cpuc.ca.gov), the net billing rate varies by hour; current values change. The useful procurement takeaway is that a solar project without some energy storage control is a weaker investment in 2025 than it was in 2020.
Path A can address this because storage can be controlled to reduce how much power you buy from SDG&E during high-price periods. Path B does not by itself shift time of use. If you charge an Amped Outdoors battery from the wall at 9 a.m. and run a camera at 9 p.m., you are still paying for that energy; the battery just made the outage window shorter. That is fine if the goal is resilience, not rate savings. Do not confuse the two.
Conclusion for this dimension: If you are choosing between solar-plus-storage and a portable 60Ah lithium battery in San Diego, you are answering two different questions. The solar path is an economic and reliability project. The battery path is a small-load reliability project.
So Which Do You Choose?
Here is the scene-specific recommendation I gave our team.
Choose a full-service provider like Sunrun/Vivint Solar, or another qualified solar-storage contractor with the same scope, if your building has real energy usage and you want one accountable system for 20 years. Confirm that the legal entity is clear and that the quote includes interconnection, monitoring, battery controls and the subpanel that protects your essential loads.
Choose the Amped Outdoors 60Ah lithium battery and a NOCO lithium battery charger if your failure mode is small, clear, and low-energy. Buy it for security cameras, sensors, communications and small tool loads. Assign someone to check the state of charge monthly and store it according to the manual. Then build a simple test schedule. That setup has saved us in two short commercial power events.
Do not choose the portable lithium product only because every LiFePO4 battery is deep cycle. That is only half right. The good news is a complete lithium battery and charger path is small enough to test quickly. The bad news is a battery that is too small for your emergency load is just an expensive flashlight.
The industry changed around Vivint Solar, Sunrun, and battery chemistry. The old principle did not: start with the required loads, then compare the total cost of the certified solution.