I'm sort of curious how the economics of this will end up working out from a consumer's perspective. Lithium ion's big advantage was energy density -- you can store a lot of juice for not much mass or volume, which is a really big deal for portable electronics or cars... for a stationary home installation, though, much less so. Having a giant thing sitting in your backyard might be okay if it was high-capacity and cheap, and it seems like there might be other contenders besides Li-ion that might do well given the different set of operating constraints that stationary storage would have. Maybe other battery chemistries, or maybe kinetic energy storage devices like evacuated flywheels, compressed air, etc....
Energy density is still important for home installations, especially if you have ambitions of retro fitting on a wide scale. If you could get to a situation where solar + battery was cheaper than a grid connection, a majority of the population will still not buy it if it's something which will require a half tonne object to be installed on a specially constructed concrete plinth, brought on a lorry with a crane system, and taking up 2m x 1m of space. Far, far better if it can be within the size and weight range of a normal white box utility, for instance the kind of freezer that people put in their garage.
In the rural or suburban US, it is very common for homes to have large propane tanks for heating and cooking, due to them being too far away from supply lines for natural gas. The tank is typically much larger than your example.
Not to mention essentially all new homes have central A/C with one of the heat exchangers "installed on a specially constructed concrete plinth." We have plenty of space; it's simply not an issue.
