Just had someone knocking on the door trying to sell me solar panels.
I never buy from cold callers but it has made me wonder about them

Anyone on singletrack got any real life info

It all depends on how your looking to pay IME

You can either pay upfront and receive all the feed in tariff and reduced bills from the off

Use someone like a shade greener who basically rent your roof for 25 years, in return they want all the feed in tariff and you just get a saving on your electric bill

Then there a companies who basically fit the system against a 10 year finance plan. The FIT tariff should cover the finance, with you receiving a reduced bill for the first 10 years, Then after the finance you will receive the FIT tariff and cheaper bills

i think they all have plus and negatives, if your looking to stay in the house for 10 years plus, i would suggest paying upfront as long term you will see the best returns

Rumour has it that the rent-a-roof system can impact badly on your house resale chances.
We paid for ours upfront about 4 years ago…. good things to have. Search is your friend.

I’ve had solar panels for about 18 months now.

Bought them outright.

Got good advice of this very forum.

The installer was excellent, a very good job completed within one week.

I have an ideal South facing roof to maximise the solar panels.

Cost £7000 to install.

Was paid £750 in the first year from the grid (FIT), and saved about £200 off our total energy costs for the same year.

Good for the planet, and good for me.

If you have the money and don’t plan on moving anytime soon, it’s a good return on your cash.

We went for the free option and rented our roof out to ‘a shade greener’ , no plans on selling the house as we plan to keep it in the family so no resale worries here.
The panels were only fitted in Dec’ 2013 and even with falling electricity prices over the last 12 months we have saved more than £500. The main thing is to make sure you use the free energy properly , meaning you don’t run lots of high drain items(irons/kettles/tumble driers ect) at the same time. Putting the kettle on even when the sun is high in the sky gets the red light on the meter flashing but the washing machine and tumble drier will run together for free.

13 months ago we were paying £119 a month for combined gas and electric we now pay £57!!

Whereabouts are you Denis? I’m in Oxfordshire and have been considering solar – relevant recommendations would be welcome!

This will sound a bit smug but hey….

We bought a house with solar panels already fitted. The tariff was transferred to us and was the original one which gives the biggest benefit. So we’ve gained the most from this arrangement and I accept that but you could argue the house price was higher because of them.

Anyway….

We get around £900 a year from the electric company.
Our electricity bill is also £9 a month (their lowest tariff) and they owe us more money every quarter because we use less than the £9 tariff gives us.
I think they owe us around £200 at the moment.

So I’d say get someone else to install them and then reap the rewards.

HI Gray,

I live in Neath,very near Afan.

Five and half years here. Another year to break even and after that it’s about 2000e a year tax free. SW France.

An alternative to electric is solar thermal, we have 4 panels feed into 750L thermal store = sun produces almost all our hot water in the summer and 50-75% of our heating (underfloor) in the winter, and we get paid for what we produce. Will take about 6y in total to repay cost based on performance over last 2y (system talks to manufacturer base) -based upon savings+rebates. System should last 15-20y. We rebuilt so put in ++ insulation so that flatters the system, but would recommend solar thermal if like me you have kids who shower for hours then get out and leave it running.

On that theme….

My grandad built his own solar heating system. Put a massive house radiator on his garage roof, covered it with some old double glazing he salvaged from somewhere.

He had some mad thermostat system going which I was too young to understand but when it was warm under the glass the system would pump water out to the radiator and it would come back red hot.

Mine have just broken even – I’ll see your smugness and raise you very smug….

Three caveats to my system:

I got them at cost price, I got on the first tariff and my meter goes backwards when there is excess – in effect, I’m getting 62 pence for every kW generated – somewhere around 2500kW/h per annum.

These days, as stated above, if you have the cash, the return will be the equivalent of about 7-11% over the 20 years. The actually return depends on how south your roof is, and how well you make use of the free Leccy. That means how much you can use during the day between April and October.

You should expect to pay in the region of £5-£6k inc VAT, and make sure you get references from the installer.

Hth

I like this but I also like the other half of the building please … 😀

Snohetta

Dicky – i’d question your sums regarding the contribution to heating in the winter, if you don’t get all your hot water in summer.

A 210 litre hot water tank takes about. 16 kWh to heat to 60 degrees. Solar thermal produces about 20-25% of the summer generation, in winter (that’s one of the big problems getting heat out of solar thermal) – if the system is big enough to heat your house in winter, it’s massively(x10 or so)oversized for hot water use in summer. If it’s sized for hot water in summer, it’s not big enough to do more than tickle the heating in winter.

Nice house – 150m2 of PV – £55grand. Unless they are the solar tiles – £100k

I worked for Saint Gobain renewables division (the client for that house above)when they were looking at code 6 (zero carbon) houses and it was just stupid costs – pretty much grand designs and not really mass market – I think we are closer to it being affordable but it’s still some way off for the housing associations to build them.

Smudger666 – Member

Nice house – 150m2 of PV – £55grand. Unless they are the solar tiles – £100k

I worked for Saint Gobain renewables division (the client for that house above)when they were looking at code 6 (zero carbon) houses and it was just stupid costs – pretty much grand designs and not really mass market – I think we are closer to it being affordable but it’s still some way off for the housing associations to build them.

Yes, I suspect it will be very expensive as technology is still catching up. I would design it differently but no money no talk for me at the moment …

Actually, my math was wrong above – take a third off that £55k

Solar thermal. Five months of the year it’s 100% solar unless we have guests or three consecutive really cloudy days. The rest of the year the solar system serves as a pre-heater before a conventional electric tank. Today (sunny) the solar tank reached about 25°C so about a 15°C gain, on cloudy days gain is negligible in Winter. Over the year I estimate it saves us about 2/3 of our hot water bill or about 100e. It thermo-syphons so there are no pumps or control systems. Cold showers are cured by washing the panel. The washing machine is fed direct on the fill cycle.

I built everything myself including the panel so it only cost 1100e and will pay for itself in about 11 years. The commercial system would have taken at least 20 years.

Will be breaking even sometime this year…. ( thats not counting the reduction in imported from the grid electricity over the last 5 years ), so in all probability already into profit
Installed 3.24 Kw system Feb 2010, so we are on the first FIT tariff from the start in april 2010, but also received a “clearskies ” grant for installation ……best investment I have ever made !

Also got a 30 tube Solar Thermal unit on the roof… Luckily have good southerly aspect… and from April to September usually do not have to use additional energy for Domestic Hot water . Bought the components from Navitron who have a useful forum for renewable energy etc.

If you’re thinking about it do your homework first, not all panels are created equal and a lot of the sales people have no clue about what they’re selling (invariably lower tier crap in such instances).

Samuri – sounds like a convection system of some sort, I seem to remember something like that from my studies, it basically syphons itself around and heats water in a tank as it gives up its energy.

The best advice I had, was to carefully choose the installer.

The cheapest quotes were not what I went with.

All the people who gave me quote ( bar the one I chose), didn’t mention strengthening the roof joists.

He said the weight of the solar panels was too great without the additional work. He also explained the differences in the solar panels from manufacturer to manufacturer.

If you live in South Wales, I can firmly recommend him.

My main reason for wanting it is to be self sufficient if power cuts become a common event.
How does that differ from selling ithe back to the grid?

zippy

its not cheap to be self sufficient…

standard PV installation BY LAW have to switch off within a few milliseconds of the grid going down. this is to protect the workers fixing the problems – the last thing they need is a live cable on a sunny day downstream of any faults.

it is possible to have auto switch over to battery backup but these are expensive – not least because the batteries have a fairly limited lifespan and need replaced. they also need to be notified to the local network company and the regulations are more onerous, and hence the price is a lot higher.

depending in what you want to do while the grid is down, a small generator with manual switch over might be the best answer – much cheaper for a start.

my mother in law lives in a similar situation and has a little honda generator – max output is about 2kW which is enough to power the boiler/pump so she has heat (its a rayburn so she can also cook) and a few LED lights. the manual switch over disconnects her house from the mains and makes the generator circuit live, and vice versa when she switches back.

During a power cut, if you are Grid tied the solar panels will not help ! They will isolate….this is important as workmen believing that lines are dead would suddenly find that they are live, as you would be feeding into grid.
This is why any form of Grid Tie must be installed and inspected by approved electricians.
If you are totally “off grid” then you can almost suit yourself….you’re only likely to kill yourself ……still not a good idea , so advice would be to install and get checked over by professional.

I reckon about 6-7 years to break even here. I work at home so can time the washing machine and dishwasher for when the sun’s out. That said, I’ve earned about 37p in Jan so far, middle of June and money is raining from the sky. Ish 🙂

Of course even if your (DC) solar generation did keep running independently and you disconnected yourself from your incoming supply (perfectly acceptable by the way, the generator must be disconnected from the distribution system – switching off is only one way of achieving this) to power your AC equipment you’d need an inverter capable of running without an AC mains connection – I doubt many G83 orientated inverters have this capability, but you can sort this by throwing money at it.
Now all you have to do is balance the power produced by the panels and consumed by your equipment- as mentioned a battery is the easiest way to do this.

Or buy a Honda generator, and remember to switch off your mains connection before you start it up.

Or accept that the 99.98% availability of your mains supply is going to be difficult to improve cheaply (or at least cheaply and easily).

PS don’t get me wrong – islanded networks can be done and the price to do it will fall and the technicalities will get easier. It’s just not easy or cheap now.