Solar - What to buy? What have you got?

[trumpisagit]

I have got several quotes for solar panels on both sides of the roof (East and West), plus battery.
Unfortunately none of the quotes are comparable.
They all recommend slightly different systems and I don't know to what extent it is worth paying more for a bigger or better system.

We have a chimney that casts shade on the West facing roof so will need some sort of optimisation.
Options are:
Enphase microinverters
Tigo optimisers
Solar Edge Panel Optimisers
Shading optimisation (not explained in detail)

These are 4 different quotes.
Then 4 different battery options etc.
What have you got, and what would you recommend?

The only "advice" I have found is from salespeople who are selling their particular system.

I have a 4kw system & get paid for generation in accordance with the old FIT. I currently optimise generation personal use with a hot water diverter on the immersion. I will probably get an EV in a few years with smart charing prioritisation.

My recommendation would be to ignore everything the sales depts give you & run through the maths very carefully to see if it's actually worthwhile.

I've looked at expanding my system (I have a double garage south facing roof) & getting battery storage. The reality is that neither currently make any economic sense to do & effective payback is multiple decades - particularly so with the battery.

Yes the battery is expensive c. £4500 but we use quite a lot of electricity: teenagers and e.v. Hoping to generate up to 6000 kwh.
With the increase in electricity prices I think the payback for us will be less than 10 years, but that is assuming electricity prices continue to rise.
Thanks

Are you hoping that it will be economically viable?

It won't.

Interesting.
I think it could be economically viable, eventually.

If you invested £10,000, what do you suppose it would be worth in ten years?

If you spent £10,000 on panels and batteries, what do you suppose it would save you in ten years?

@PigletJohn
If I invested my £10000 in my savings acct or isa it would gain 0.05 % so £5 per year. £50 in ten years. I appreciate that there are better offers but anything with a good return is risky.
Shares we have purchased in the past haven't performed that well, or when they have we haven't been quick or smart enough to sell them at the right time.
I work in property. Solar panels on the roof would increase the price (not by as much as the installation), so if you plan to sell in the next 10 years you might get 50% back through increase in value of the property.
Is it a good investment?
Perhaps not, but I don't think it's a money pit (on my calculations) either.
Where would you invest your £10k?
Obviously there are environmental considerations too.

Yes but if the price of your property does increase in 10 years that will not be due to the solar panels, in fact as a lot of buyers dont like them it could be in spite of them
So unless I am missing something as an investment they are terrible. I’m not saying don’t have them, it’s something we may consider next year but there’s no ROI that I can see.

my pension fund has grown at around 8% p.a.

If your solar brings in £1,000 a year (unlikely) then after ten years you would be no better off than if you had wrapped the cash in a sock and put it undder the mattress. No growth, no profit, not even keeping up with inflation.

@trumpisagit "If I invested my £10000 in my savings acct or isa it would gain 0.05 % so £5 per year"

cash is not an investment, but you you could get about 1% average return on Premium Bonds. Tax free.

still less than inflation though

I have solar, and it produces most electricity on sunny summer days, when you have no need of lighting or heating. Today is cold and quite sunny on the South Coast and we had a few hours of 1000-2000W generation, which reduced the cost of running the tumble drier.

It is not worthwhile using it for an immersion heater if you have a gas boiler, because energy from gas is so much cheaper that the saving is insignificant.

Maybe if you had a couple of plug-in electric cars you could make use of it in summer, but possibly not enough to cover the extra cost of the car and the charging circuit.

We have 28 panels east/west sides with an immersion diverter. Been up six years and cost £7k, with £1k back a year in FiT, so next year they will have paid for themselves. We've just had a quote for batteries at about £3k, but not sure if we'll go down that road yet.

I don't know all the technical details and would be more reluctant to buy now due to the lack of FiT, although our motivation was environmental as well as financial.

@stripesandyellow yes, the lack of feed in tariff is a huge difference now, financially.
I think electricity prices will continue to rise though.
Our current fixed rate of 16p per kwh is going up to 26p per kwh in Jan, and the expectation is that all elec prices will rise in April.

@PigletJohn we already have the electric vehicle (work car) so the cost of the panels isn't expected to cover this or the charging unit.
We would definitely get a battery or we wouldn't be able to use all the power we generate during the day.

I wouldn't bother unless you have money to thr5away. It will not pay for itself and certainly will not make you money. Those days have gone.

I'm surprised by the negativity here. Are solar panels really that bad?

@BlackKittyKat

I'm surprised by the negativity here. Are solar panels really that bad?

The pigeon issues would put me off.

What size battery are they recommending?

As a guide price, without a battery, you should be looking at £1,600 per kW installed. I suspect the proposal with the microinverters will be significantly higher than this though.

I think not being completely at the mercy of electricity companies price setting is worth quite a lot. Plus environmentally it is satisfying to do your washing /charge your car etc when it will all be powered by your roof. Admittedly that's not really going to happen at this time of year, but there are plenty of months when it can be done.

Solar panel owner here. Even though we paid a LOT for our panels 10 years ago, they've more than paid for themselves since thanks to the FiT payments, but even if we'd managed to use every last drop of leccy we've generated, we'd still have only saved 6.7 grand in reduced bills. (in practice, I'd estimate about 50% is exported anyway, so yeah, tough to get your money if there's no feed-in-tariff at all (has it been removed entirely?)

BTW: Yes, we have a couple of pigeons hanging about on the roof. I quite like them, it's not as if we're inundated... - odd reason to no have them put in

The feed in tariff has been removed entirely; however, there is an option called the Smart Export Guarantee, whereby your electricity provider will pay you for each unit of electricity exported to the grid. It's not much though and it depends on your electricity provider. Generally - Octopus, Bulb, etc would pay more than EDF/EOn (but then I suspect that might have changed based on the current crisis).

It's always better to offset as much of the electricity you're buying from the grid though (at 26p/kWh) rather than selling it to the grid for 5p/kWh.

@BlackKittyKat

I'm surprised by the negativity here. Are solar panels really that bad?

no, but they are not a money-making wheeze, nor even a good investment. If you have £6,000 burning a hole in your pocket I bet you can find something better to do with it. If you live in California or the Sahara there is probably enough consistent sunlight to run your aircon and other usage, so it might be worthwhile without a subsidy.

The subsidy by FITS payments made it profitable in UK for a while, and existing customers already having a FITS contract can continue until it ends (AFAIK they were typically 20-year contracts)