Talk to me about solar panels

[JustWalkingTheDogs]

Don’t really know where to start, as there seems so many companies who do this and I can’t see the wood for the trees at the moment.

We have 2 electric vehicles and are on the octopus ev tariff, which works well when we charge them overnight and I wfh, but we want to take the next step and generate (and store)our own energy. We are looking to retire in about 6 years so also trying to future proof our house for this. We don’t have the available money to buy outright, but have seen octopus are doing a 0% finance deal at the moment.

What do you wise MN suggest I need to look out for, any pit falls or suggestions?

---

Updated by MNHQ
Landed on this page in search of solar panel advice? Find our guide to installing solar panels in your home in the UK. HTH!

Make sure if you install them you understand the Feed in tariff rates, make sure that you own the solar panels not the company as if you don’t own the panels they can be installed on your roof but the company can get the FiT payments and also this is a huge problem if you sell the house as they are not part of the outright sale Costs of solar have come down like anything compare companies is there any houses near you with panels ask for recommendations.

We have solar panels and battery storage.
we also have an electric car. We are on the octopus go tariff.
during warmer weather our electricity costs are zero. We also sell back to the grid.
we charge the batteries from solar during the day and use the electricity in the evening.
we bought everything outright. They are also fully covered for any damage on our house insurance

If you have the money its possibly worth while. In Northern climes the payback is probably 20 years.

Make sure you get a decent brand of battery and inverter and be aware that inverters will fail at least once during the lifetime of the system.

We used a company called Joju (I think, will have to check spelling) who were very good for installation on our back garage roof. We also have a Tesla battery for storage (I wonder if others are now widely available - this was 2018). We have a Mini EV. Like pp in the summer our electricity is zero, just standing charges. Even in the winter we offset a little. We are now on the Ecotricity EV tariff.

We also thought payback would be a long time, maybe 10-15 years, but then Ukraine happened and electricity went through the roof, which probably enhanced the payback. Also remember to factor in car running costs, as if you didn’t have an EV you would be paying for petrol/ diesel which is expensive; even charging at services etc costs more for electric than at home which is free sunshine. When our Tesla battery is full on sunny days, we charge up the car as well to benefit as much as possible.

I’ve got this configuration, we’ve had solar panels for 10+ years so get feed in tariff, I sell any extra solar back to octopus. I have 20kwh of batteries that I charge at night whilst it’s cheap and use during the day. I have a plug in hybrid and an air source heat pump. I love all of it 😁😁😁

Here you go OP
www.jojusolar.co.uk/

One thing - it tooks us ages to get a smart meter, and this is important for tariffs as you can’t benefit from overnight cheap rates unless you have a smart meter. First Covid delayed it and then various installers couldn’t cope with the extra wiring for the solar. Eventually we hired our own electrician and asked Ecotricity to send someone extra qualified and that did it, but it delayed our optimum tariff for some years. If you don’t already have one, get it sorted immediately!

Feed-in tariffs ended in 2019, and were replaced by the smart export guarantee scheme for new installations. As far as I know, it's pretty usual now for installations to be owned outright by the customer, not the company (as the FIT scheme no longer operates for new installations).

We have solar panels but no battery, so we export surplus electricity back to the grid (and are paid for it by Octopus, who generally have the best export rates for existing customers). For us, it wasn't worth getting a battery, as we both WFH frequently, so are able to arrange our lives around using more energy when the sun is shining (e.g. doing washing, using the dishwasher on sunny mornings, etc). We also have an EV that we can charge overnight at 7.5p/kWh, so for us it's cheaper to pay that and export surplus energy at 15p/kWh than to store that energy in an expensive battery and use it to charge the car. So it's worth thinking about your specific lifestyle and patterns of energy use (and how flexible you can be about that) before deciding on whether to get a battery.

While octopus are generally a good company get quotes from a local firm or two and check that a bank loan or 0% credit card would not give you a better deal. We were thinking of an Octopus heat pump but couldnt get straight answers from them on how much we'd need to pay for their survey. The likely costs shot up once we started looking at what it would really cost and not the figure they suggest when sucking you in.

Firstly you need to look at your use age of electricity, either from bills or from a smart meter. Are you thinking of Solar and battery - which I would recommend? We have 4kw array of panels and can get anything from 0.25 kw in murky window to 25kw generation at peak time. I would suggest battery capacity at least double capacity of the panels - ie 4kw array plus minimum 8 kw battery but would depend on your use of electric. You need to talk to a local installer as well as octopus who are I believe a bit pricy. I used a company in Doncaster for my battery and would recommend - Ivoltz - and they do special offer packages of panels and batteries. Don’t forget to ask about bird netting as well and possibly a Solar diverter if you have an immersion heater as part of your boiler system

Also check out who your mortgage is with Barclays have a green scheme where you can get cash back (was £2k) for green energy installs. Other banks may also do this.

We have similar set up to @notapizzaeater, with solar panels, battery storage (15kw) and EVs (2)
We are on Octopus’ EV tariff so get electricity cheaply in the night - so will charge a vehicle and either charge or top up the batteries (depending on how much solar we’ve generated) and that means effectively 90% of our electricity use is at cheap rates - even with a heat pump which uses a fair amount of electricity when it’s colder
Also just to flag if you generate more than you need you can sell back via a different firm than your electricity provider. So we get our electricity from Octopus, but sell to Scottish Power as their feed in tariff was higher….

We've had a 6.4kwp system with a battery for 25 months (in Northern Ireland, not renowned for its sunshine). It has generated 10,300 units in that time despite the last two spring/summers being well below the average for sunshine. At current energy prices it will have paid for itself in 9 years. Our car is 17 years old - I'm contemplating an EV when it dies, but we are already use most of what we generate (81%) because of the battery and export very little, so I'm not sure it would make much difference.

Edited to add... in NI we have a limit on the size of the invertor for domestic generation (3.68kW), so (here) solar would only be capable of small top ups of an ev and not a full charge.

16 panels, southwest aspect. The number of kw very much depends on the weather! For example, today is 26kw, but yesterday was only 7. This month so far it has generated 402kw and is better than last year. June-August a bright day we'd get about 40-45 - the invertor limit is a major throttle. Almost nothing in the winter months.

@maguiresarah we have 12 panels. For KW hours per day. It depends on the weather.
today we got around 18.3 kWh. In the summer we can get over 30.

Feed in tariffs ended years ago.

OP you need to find out whether you will be limited to the standard array size. We are. It’s frustrating because we have an enormous south facing roof but are limited by the permitted size of the inverter because the local infrastructure can’t cope with too much excess supply in the summer.

its not so much of an issue now that we have an ev though since I am slightly obsessive about scheduling our energy use and so we don’t sell much back. We have a battery, an ev and solar immersion for our water heating plus we have an electric aga. We use very little from the grid in the summer

@marsaline how good is your immersion boiler? I’ve always wondered about solar for that - our heating and hot water is still gas. What do you do in the winter?

Our system is set up so that it powers as follows:

active usage in house
if there is excess charge battery
if there is excess charge car
if there is excess heat water using solar immersion (we also obviously have oil water heating but we rarely use that now)
if there is excess sell to the grid.

From mid march through to october ish our bills are very small. There will always be a small amount form the grid since the solar levels fluctuate and if for example someone is boiling the kettle whilst someone else is ironing then the usage would be temporarily higher than could be provided by the solar panels.

Now that we have an EV we are on an EV rate which is only 9p at night so we also charge the car and the battery and the solar immersion at night.

It means our bills are very low from March to November and we are limited by the inverter plus we are a high usage household (circa 35kw per day with the EV)

During the winter we generate very little from the panels but use the EV rate to charge the battery and the car at night.

We found our installer by recommendation from an electrician friend. We have 10 panels and a battery, and charge 2 EVs using the octopus overnight tariff.

Our setup is like @marsaline describes.

At a similar time we got our central heating fully serviced and flushed with some replacement bits, plus we have improved our insulation. Our total energy bills have gone from an insane £300 a month to £100 a month - during the summer we are paying pennies. Payback on the solar panels and battery alone will be 8 years, which is fairly standard.

Get a battery if you have space and can afford it. We used a great company called Skylar Solar who did us in SE England and my DB in North East Mids.

Thanks @marsaline - we have the same as you pretty much except the immersion. One to think about.

Positive experience here with 17 panels in north west England. battery, inverter and electric car. This week we are likely to send some power to the grid - happens quite a lot between April and October. From May to September we will pay almost nothing, except for the electric car, but the cheap overnight octopus tariff pays for that.

one top tip if you go ahead. Consider bird proofing from the off. For some reason we didn’t and now are having to get the bird proofers in because we have pigeons nesting under them. Far cheaper to have bird proofing from the off than have to get Scaffolding etc installed a second time.