Anyone got solar panels?

[TheShellBeach]

We had them installed today.
I was just wondering how much lower our electricity bills are going to be.

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Updated by MNHQ
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We have solar panels but I can’t comment how much your bills will lower because I don’t know how many panels you have, which way they face, if you are in the UK, or how much electricity you normally consume during the day, whether you have battery storage etc. Do you have an app for them?

Edited to add I couldn’t work it out even if you told me all of this info and I presume you’ll also be selling what you don’t use?

Over the summer probably to a quarter of your normal bill, in winter very little. Batteries help with storage surplus.

Not necessarily. My parents still get plenty of power from theirs in the winter. Not as much as summer, obviously, but more than enough to make it worthwhile.

Do you have battery OP? This makes a huge difference. Our batteries are already achieving 100% most days, now. Obviously nov, Dec Jan Feb not great months. But it has substantially lowered our bills, we use a lot of electricity.

As PP have said it depends on the number of panels and if you have batteries. Octopus have the best export rates so if you’re not with them already I would switch. We got paid over £500 for energy we exported last year so it’s well worth it. Their app is easy to use, you can see on a daily basis how much you have imported and exported.

As others have said it depends on how many, whether you have battery storage and the orientation and shading of your roof. Plus things like whether you have optimisers on them and then also whether the grid has limited the amount you can generate.

Ours are limited by the grid because the infrastructure around here can't cope with too much excess power being fed back into the grid when the sun is out. So at the most we generate 3.68kw which is the default level set by the DNO. We have an 8kw battery and we also have a solar immersion heater so in the summer our water is often taken care of too.

October to February inclusive we generate very little, probably absolute maximum a couple of kwh a day. From March through to the end of September we generate a good amount but you will never cover it all unless you have massive battery storage since you will always have times when you need more than your battery can discharge at any one time.

It's cloudy here but dry and I'm currently generating 1.13kw. Yesterday I generated about 18kwh and the grid provided 5.8kwh (fairly large house with 4 x adults)

We have had them 3 weeks now and with the battery have all but stopped importing electricity from the grid (2Kwh in all that time) with the money we get from exporting we have managed to not only pay for that 2Kwh but pay both our gas and electricity standing charge so currently are fully self sufficient. I guess that in the depths of winter we may use a bit but over the year will now spend nothing on the electric. Would be a different story without the battery though.

When we had ours done the people installing them went through the expected output of the panels. Actually the required output (our electricity usage) was the starting point and they worked from that to calculate the number of panels needed given the direction of our roof, over shading etc.

We don't get paid for any excess we generate but we can offset against what we take from the grid (we don't have batteries). We generate more than we use during sunny months and not enough during cloudy months but it evens out to about zero. We are not in the UK so you may not be able to achieve 100% but the people installing will be able to tell you what is achievable.

We have 3.5kw of panels on our (south facing) roof and a 4kw battery. We're with octopus. But previous 2 months our bills were

5 March - 5 April
Electricity (including standing charge) - £28.25
Electricity exported +£24.44

5 Feb - 5 March
Electricity - £21.90
Electricity exported +£7.07

Im not aware of any electricity suppliers in the UK who allow you to offset. Here you will be paying multiple times to import what you get "paid" to export" so there's no incentive for the electricity companies to just allow you to offset.

@TheShellBeach as DO2 says it will totally depend on your setup. We have solar panels but no battery, we do how ever have them linked to the immersion heater on the hot water tank and our car charger. So in summer, we can heat all our hot water and charge the car to some extent. We got ours just before the feed in tariff ended so get paid for 50% of what we produce. So probably get paid back more then if just selling electric back into the grid.

We do want to add a battery but as DH said it just wasn't worth while at the time and we really want one with a grid cutoff so we could still power the house in a blackout. At the time only tesla did this with there power walls, I believe there maybe some more options for this now. But it is more expensive to install a gateway system anyway.

The payment per Khw for the feed in tariff is lower though then what you get paided if you sell back I believe. But as they where switching over at the time we had them installed and no electric companies where paying for electricity back to the grid at that point, it made sense to get them in quickly and get the FIT rate.

You will have done the sensible thing. My payback rate is about 6p. Its rubbish.

Oh interesting! And we thought we were getting a bad deal because we werent paid for excess! I didn't even consider that they'd not let you sell at the same price that you buy but I guess that makes sense (although I'm sure they price it unfairly).

We had the grid cut out fitted at a cost of £800 and we have not got Tesla batteries. Caused the meter fitter a surprise when he pulled the mains fuse out and realised the lights and radio were still on.