South African (SA) households are experiencing energy crisis as a result of recurring load shedding and electricity price increase. The power disruption results in food spoilage and pose various challenges, particularly for residential consumers. Adoption of a roof-top solar photovoltaic (PV) battery based system is a key solution to mitigate such challenges. Frequent daily power outages discourage the adoption of the Feed-in Tariffs (FIT) approach among residential consumers. Consequently, there is a need for a battery storage system to store excess energy for subsequent use. This study, therefore aims to determine the optimal battery recharging strategy for a grid-tied residential consumer with a solar PV-battery based system. The objective function is formulated to justify the effectiveness of the evaluated strategies in reducing the electricity bills within the framework of South African time-of-use (TOU) pricing scheme. The findings of the study indicated that relying solely on a PV array to recharge the battery bank does not yield the most optimal grid cost savings under the existing SA TOU tariff scheme. Therefore, incorporating both grid and solar PV-array for recharging the battery banks has the potential to achieve an energy cost saving of 53.2%.