We are hopefully moving house (London) in a few months and I think the roof is prime for solar panels. It’s south-facing with a good view of the sky. On a quick bit of Googling the price appears to have come down greatly and appears to be closer in cost with the annual cost of the terrible electricity prices we will be paying soon.
So – for people with them, what’s your experience with them?
* Are they reliable? I don’t mean the sunlight – do you need maintenance or do they often just inexplicably stop working? ie what’s the hassle factor of having them?
* Would you recommend getting a battery for when you don’t need to use the power?
* Would you recommend selling your power back to the networks?
* Can you realistically charge your car with it?
* Going into this energy crisis do you feel like you have made a smart move?
* Overall, is it worth it?
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>Are they reliable? I don’t mean the sunlight – do you need maintenance or do they often just inexplicably stop working? ie what’s the hassle factor of having them?
Had them for two and a half years. So far the only hassle is worrying about pigeons crapping on them
>Would you recommend getting a battery for when you don’t need to use the power?
100%. Get one with a backup power function if you can afford it too. The battery basicslly doubles your price, but it stores your energy for times when you’d otherwise have to use grid power
>Would you recommend selling your power back to the networks?
You don’t really get much choice. But if you can find an SEG provider that pays the most – currently that’s octopus . You may be stuck with one provider for a while after installation, but you can change the company you sell to without changing your energy supplier
However they pay a pittance. The most you can get last time I checked is 7.5p per kwh, while buying from the grid is closer to 30p. So do what you can to use your power before it goes to the grid.
>Can you realistically charge your car with it?
Yes. My dad has a charger that let’s him feed the solar excess, and only the solar excess, into the car – but it only goes on as fast as mains power. So it takes a lot longer
Certain cars and certain systems offer bidirectional power which means you can also use the car battery the same way you would a backup house battery. I don’t know much about this though
>Going into this energy crisis do you feel like you have made a smart move?
Absofuckinglutly. If you can get a heat pump installed the solar would also offset your heating costs in the winter. If also look into solar water heating systems, be it roof based or a diverter that heats your tank directly from solar panels
>Overall, is it worth it?
Abso fucking lutely. Its expensive, but it’s making my energy bills tolerable. And these days I can do my washing during the day and only pay for the water.
Had them in 10 years &, even on one of the better FITs, the capital outlay won’t be paid back for another ~2 years, so if you take lost compound interest on that capital, I might only be up £5k after 25 years… I’ve not fully worked it out.
However, being WFH, I was able to change my routine to do drying, showers, cooking, & other high-energy usage activities during the best PV producing times of day, so will have also saved a bunch there.
For me maintenance has been zero, but that might be ‘cos, living in the north of Scotland, we don’t get the intensity / frequency of generation as the south.
Should also mention my house roof is E – W so the 2 banks of panels aren’t pushing my inverter at the same time, which might also help its longevity.
I’ve not got a battery & won’t unless they majorly come down in price.
At the time the money was sitting in the bank doing very little, so I figured 25 year guaranteed FITs, plus my own usage would be worthwhile. Overall I think it was worth it tho’.
We’ve had solar panels on our house since May 2015. Just recently, we reached the payback point – they have now delivered more benefits (payments for generation, payments for export, savings through not having to buy from the grid) than they cost us to install.
* Are they reliable? – Yes. The only hassle we had was that some pigeons started nesting under them, and in the process they seem to have damaged one of the cables. So we had to get some [pigeon proofing](https://solaskirt.co.uk/) installed.
* Battery? – I honestly don’t know. I’ve thought about it but I’m struggling to make a business case. The way I see it, an 8kWh battery holds about £2 worth of electricity at current prices. If we could fully charge it from the solar panels every day and fully discharge it every night, the benefit would be about £700 per year. But in practice we can’t do that: in the summer we don’t use 8kWh overnight, and in the winter we don’t generate 8kWh over and above our daytime usage. In practice I estimate the benefit we’d get would be maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of that £700 per year, and that won’t pay for a battery. Even if (when!) the price of electricity doubles, it still doesn’t look that attractive.
* Exporting? – You don’t have a choice. Everything you don’t use goes back into the grid. All you can do is shop around for a supplier who’ll give you the best rate for it. The scheme is called the Smart Export Guarantee.
* Charging your car? – I guess so. We don’t have an EV so I don’t have any experience of it, but I can do the maths. Our panels (on a south facing roof in the south of England) generate about 4000 kWh per year, and we use about 2400 kWh per year, so in principle we would have about 1600 kWh per year available to charge an EV, which would be good for around 5000 miles. But that would all be in the summer. From October to March, we don’t get enough sunlight to power our household, let alone a car on top of that.
* Smart move? – We made this decision in 2015 and we were happy with a 7-year payback then. We’re even happier now.
* Is it worth it? – For us, yes. For you – you’ll have to do the maths. In round numbers, in a typical year we generate 4000 kWh for which we are paid (FIT tariff) 17p/kWh; we export 3000 kWh per year at 6p/kWh; and we use 1000 kWh which saves us 28p/kWh now but probably 45p/kWh from October. So that’s a benefit of ~£1300 per year. Yours would be less with no FIT payments, but more with a battery and possibly an EV, but your capital cost would be higher with a battery. And if you’re not in the south of England you won’t generate as much as us to start with. You need to do the maths.
All good info. Thank you for the detailed answers everybody!