Are solar panels amazing or a con?

[PettsWoodParadise]

DH thinks they are a con. He doesn’t think the 25 year insurance is worth the digital paper it is written on. He thinks it will devalue the house as you can’t do a loft conversion once they are on. He also thinks the panels stop working full after ten years and degrade by year 7. I pay the bills and we are likely to be here for another 15 years when DD may take over the house and we’ve somewhere smaller so it is a ping term proposition.

I have had three quotes. £7k difference between lowest and highest. There are differences in battery size, equalisers, bird preventers, switches for the hot water tank etc. I live in the south east so get more sunshine than Scotland. All estimates have come back that ROI would be after 7 years which doesn’t sound bad if they will work for the full 25 as ‘guaranteed’.

When I ask questions I get different answers. One said it would give me energy security, another said they’d stop working in a power cut due to safety. One said I didn’t have to have a smart meter, another said I did even if I didn’t want to get money back from grid. One said the battery was mine to use as I wish, another said a power provider could drain my battery if they wanted. One said if the panel stopped working at 90% I could get a replacement, another said any percentage (5% of capacity for example) meant it was working and no refund under insurance.

I am disappointed at the differing information and when I press for hard answers aren’t getting any.

Can you recommend good solar panel companies or tell me about your solar experience (good or bad)? Thank you. I am talking about an average £15k investment here and gradually losing the will to talk to the companies more as I don’t know what to believe.

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Updated by MNHQ
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p.s thank you in advance for any insight!

It's scary when it's such a huge amount of money and you're getting conflicted advice. We decided to go with a company we found on Which Trusted Traders as figured it'd be less of a risk. Might be worth getting a subscription temporarily to find a company based near you? A couple of banks now offer money off for 'green improvements' £2000 for solar panel installs I think so if you have a mortgage check Google your bank to see if they do that. HSBC do and I think Barclays. Or as an alternative to getting panels them on your own house you could invest with Ripple rippleenergy.com . This is the company we used: skylarsolar.co.uk.

It depends on what happens with energy prices, how quickly you make your money back, so no one can give you a definitive answer on that. As for the battery thing, I think that depends on how it's been set up. Batteries can be configured to work during a power cut. You can also set your battery up to take from the grid, which is handy in the winter when your solar generation is lower, if you get a tariff which is cheaper eg. overnight, you can charge up it then then discharge it during the day to save money.

We had solar panels and battery back up fitted last March 22, worth it to us, we are a home of four adults that all WFH. Made a huge difference to our electricity bill, from April till the end of October our electricity bills are v low. We paid £10k for our system. I think they are more expensive now. If you have the means to do it, I would.

You seem to have missed the obvious starting point which is how much electric do you use and when?

We went solar at the beginning of the year but I don't have a gas connection. I'm also on a split tariff so can benefit from the battery even in winter.

I would track your electric meter and write down your usage for a week in blocks of a few hours if you can. Also look at the rating of your appliances.
I really rate solar power but you need to understand it's limitations as well. Our main grid use now is the shower as it is 10kwh. Even at full capacity and full battery, that's more than the inverter can manage as a power draw .
Same will apply if your cooking style is to have the oven, grill and several hob rings on at once.

I'm north Scotland and generating more than I can use most days since April. They do work but be clear about what you are expecting it to do.

Battery size is tricky. I got 5kwh. Ideally I could have done with an additional kWh from November to February when the days are shorter but the cost of a bigger battery would have taken a very long time to pay for itself because of the short time frame (and that during this period it's also least likely to reach full charge!)

I have used £6 or electric so far this month so it is saving us a decent amount. You can't really estimate your saving accurately until you get to grips with your own usage.

We have had ours for more than ten years now. We paid to have the netting around as there is a real problem with pigeons on our estate. We get money back yearly and it has been a real safety net during the energy crisis.

The only thing we had to do was get a connection fixed in the loft because we had squirrels but that was a £100 fix in 10 years.

Can't help with answering many questions on the solar panels as they were installed when we bought our house but if you decide to get them look at getting bird proofing done ASAP. We had a nightmare with pigeons nesting under ours.

We had ours fitted in Jan via a council group tender.
My understanding is as follows:
You need a smart meter
They don't work in a power cut unless you have something else fitted (not sure what!)
Never heard of power company draining battery!
The battery max capacity is not what you actually get as it never goes below 19%
If you have any shading you need optimisers. The panels are set up in arrays (usually 7 per array) and the array is limited to the power being produced by the lowest producing panel. Unless you get optimisers. So if one of the 7 panels is behind a chimney all panels in that array only supply the power being generated by that panel even if the others are in full Sun unless you get optimisers.
As we approach summer here in SE I regularly fill up my 10kwh battery by about 3pm I then plug in my EV and charge it on the solar setting of my EV charger. This is more effective than selling to grid which pays peanuts. Be careful if you don't have EVs that you won't produce more energy than you can use. Your payback time will be higher. My friend has 18 panels and no EVs and desperately does boil washes to use all her energy.
The panels produce all our needs (except EV) nearly everyday from March..
If you don't have EVs get the hot water switch. Once battery is full the system will turn on an electric immersion heater and heat your water saving gas.
We are pleased with ours.

@Calmdown14 I’ve very much started at how much electric I use as that is how the companies come to their calculations but even then it seems a bit awry!

@BuchananBaby yes the bird thing came out of third quote so then otjer two don’t compare!

@Lottsbiffandsmudge yes optimisers came up, one quite quote included,, one doesn’t. We were told by one that shading on our property isn’t much difference amd we got one to quote for both and the ROI of the extra cost appears minimal.

@Roselilly36 thank you

@thehonscupboard this would be from savings not adding to mortgage but good point that some banks offer incentives. I looked into what we have with Nationwide but as we have overpaid in the past we would have to use that first rather than any incentive and any remortgage would wipe out any saving. I couldn’t get a clear answer on how we were insured with roof either. Darn.

@PettsWoodParadise but it's not just about what you use over the course of the day. How much you use at once is critical.

We generate more than our draw virtually every day but if the draw comes from something like a power shower, you'll still be paying the grid for it as it's too much at once for a solar system. The battery evens out some but it can still only go to the maximum your inverter can handle at once.

Saying 'we use 10kwh a day so that's what we'll save ' isn't the whole story. If that's four times a shower daily for 5kwh of it then your system will take much longer to pay for itself.

Similarly in winter it's unlikely to power a heater and then the rest of your house on what is coming in as it's not generally much over 1kw an hour on winter days.

That doesn't mean it's not great. I'm glad I did it but I now understand a lot more about what the house uses per hour!

Ask about the efficiency of the battery if you get one! Ours was only working at about 65% efficiency and so was costing us money. We get a good buy back rate from the grid so we wouldn't ever have broke even with battery cost with the list energy. We got the providers to remove it in the end, all their batteries were working at that %...

Thanks @Carolenarua that is what I worry about. Buying something then insurance denies any culpability as it ‘sort of‘ works but not as advertised.

thanks @Calmdown14 i hadn’t appreciated the different loads during the day. I had thought the battery would help even it out.

Don't get solar without batteries. And if you get batteries, try to size them to cover your daily load (As others said, figuring out your base load (when not cooking/kettle/etc) is really important, as is understanding your daily patterns of usage.

We got solar panels (16 split across east/west) + 12kw battery array + solar iBoost for hot water last year and it's been excellent so far. As we have an EV, we are on an EV tariff which means cheaper grid power for 4 hours during the night. In the winter months we used the cheap period to fill the battery, and then used it during the day when we didn't get too much sun.

Now we don't need to charge the batteries overnight as they're full by 9ish due to brighter mornings and easterly array. Having an east/west array has been great for us because it allows generation from first light until sunset, which flattens the curve significantly.

In answer to some of your points:

• if there's a power cut you won't be able to use the power in the batteries unless you have some extra electrical work done with a switch that can power a particular circuit (not the whole house). In our case, we can flick the switch to pull power from the battery to the kitchen sockets which means fridge/freezer, kettle, slow cooker and toaster will work. As we have fairly frequent power cuts (rural Yorkshire) that was important to us.
• nobody will give you a straight answer and it's infuriating. The only solution is research: local recommendations from clients and joining Facebook groups full of middle aged men with beards having opinions about inverters. But you learn a lot!
• Your power usage will change. You get used to running appliances in sequence rather than at the same time, so that the power "pull" never goes above the capacity of the inverter e.g 3.5 - anything above that and you're pulling from the grid, not batteries/panels. So you learn what your washing machine uses, and critically when in the cycle - for example it uses a load of power when it's heating up the water and spinning at the end but in the middle not much at all, so you don't have to wait to put the kettle on :)
• you get properly nerdy about it. Your friends will roll their eyes. But your bills will be tiny. It's ok to be a bit smug.
• it's a big investment but think of it as prepaying for your power for a few years. You have to pay it anyway, might as well own it and eventually it starts paying back. Not much in terms of revenue but a lot in terms of savings. We're looking at a payback of 5-6 years for ours, and our bills have dropped to about 25% of what it was - including charging the EV. Aside from the EV and battery charging in winter, we haven't pulled anything from the grid in 7 months - and absolutely nothing during the day when we'd be ordinarily paying top whack for it.

The other thing to possibly think about is a smart tariff. Now we have solar I moved to a day/ night EV tariff. The extra unit cost in the day is offset by solar and the 4 hours at a v low rate at night i use for washing machine, dishwasher and EV charging. If I have battery charge left that is used first but as @Calmdown14 says my EV draws 7kwph and the battery can't supply that (max 3kwph) so I use the cheaper night rate for any use that draws too much if that makes sense.
The move to the night rate saves me a lot. It wouldn't have made as much sense without the solar offsetting the higher day rate.

@YouCanCallMeA1 snap!!!

@YouCanCallMeA1 oooh! Getting nerdy about the subject. Yep. I feel I am going down that rabbit hole….thanks so much for all your insight, it is super helpful.

@Lottsbiffandsmudge thank you!

I think by the end of this journey anyone who has completed it deserves a PhD in home solar.

Ours are 11 years old, they came with the house when we bought it 4 years ago.

They are great for us as we use them to charge up our electric cars during the day which saves us a lot of money.

Luckily ours has a really good feed in tariff which means we receive around £2500 in payments per year.

As for them degrading, ours actually work better than they should. When we summit readings to British gas they never believe us and always send someone out to check. We did need a new inverter last year, however that was because it got damaged by an engineer from Octopus energy when they came to install a smart meter (they paid for the replacement thankfully).

@SonnySideDown
Can I ask who you get your feed-in tariff from?
With Octopus I'm getting 15p per KWh (E.on paid 3p!), so I'm curious if you're getting better than that?
Thanks

Legacy panels that have been up for a good few years may still have amazing FIT rates. You won't get that from anyone now - it's pennies. 5p is typical, 10p is good, 15p is great. But still much less than what you pay to get it from the grid.

Some, like octopus, do a flexi tariff which pays up to 30p or so per unit but honestly, don't do it in order to make money by selling electricity to the grid because you will be depressed, quickly.

Think of it as every unit you generate is 32p you DON'T need to pay someone else.

@YouCanCallMeA1 you have just described me exactly!

I don't have a smart meter (so they can definitely be installed without one) and my head is never out of the meter cupboard!

You learn to do things slightly differently as you say. My best purchase has been a little 200kwh desk heater. Was great in march and April as could keep it on as much as I wanted.

@PettsWoodParadise you are correct that the battery will balance some of the peaks and troughs but only up to the capacity of your inverter (probably 3.6kwh). It stops you drawing from the grid if you put the washer on as the sun goes behind a cloud but if you want to put the oven and dishwasher on at the same time or the kettle and microwave, you'll start drawing from the grid.

Because we don't have gas we can't really avoid using a bit from the grid for showers but as we are on economy 10 it's generally at cheap rate.

It's worth understanding your current habits and how willing you are to alter them. It doesn't bother me but if you always batch cook using multiple appliances or make a massive roast every Sunday then you won't maximise the benefits of solar.

Getting solar is a bit like planning a kitchen, you feel like you could have a new job at the end of it but you are right to ask all these questions now.

We got our panels so long ago (?2007, 6? 5?) that I don't think we considered half these things. DH is obsessed about day time usage and when it's sunny, etc., but I am not. Our bills would be low anyway, we aren't high users. The part I know is that with the tariff we could get then, the panels have mega-paid for selves. AND they over-performed, have always generated more energy than manuf. spec.

They were fairly good but new-on-market then Chinese ones.

@StopMindlesslyScrolling

We have a legacy FIT which came with the solar panels when they were installed 11 years ago. I think its about 60p a kWh, and we get that for 25 years. But nowhere will do that kind of deal now. 15p seems okay though tbh!

Had our panels over 10 years and power generated is remarkably consistent year on year - no real degradation. Pigeon proofed two years ago and added a battery this year 8.2kw - worth doing at the same time as solar as save vat at 20%. we aim to maximise use of solar PV but decided to be relaxed about usage - otherwise you can get obsessed about saving every single kw and get too nerdy.

have you been quoted the same generation power in all your quotes? You seem to have a very mixed bag of advice/information from
your suppliers - some incorrect

there is a company called Otovo - originallly Norwegian and now international- which looks at your house from satellite imaging - and suggests a solution and gives indicative quotes with various options - number of panels, battery etc. i read an article with the CEO and it’s founded good but we haven’t used them ourselves

When I was looking to get the battery I went through one of those “we will find you the best quotes” places and some of the sales people told me a pack of incorrect information! So it’s worthwhile knowing the basics about solar PV and battery. I also installed a solar PV diverted water heater at the same time