Solar panels

[Luckypants]

Originally Posted by flymo

I almost feel like I have to defend this, but I dont. Please feel free to do your own research and ask away if there's anything you want to know. I've put my money where my mouth is based on what I've learnt and so far its looking an extremely good step to take.

You don't, when looked into it, it looked a really good deal. If I was able to stay put my garage roof would be covered in them and thermal solar on the house...


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[flymo]

Happy days, just received my first solar payment today. I was pleasantly surprised to figure out that I made a small typo in my payback calculator spreadsheet formula meaning that I get twice as much per unit generated as I thought.

So, for the first 100 days I got paid £420 and saved around £150 in electricity that I would otherwise have had to buy from the grid. All that in the previous three months, about the last month or so of which has been far from ideal weather.

Roll on the summer!

[maviczap]

Blimey thats good. Good job you got yours done when you did, as haven't they changed the contract or are they about to?

[MisterTommyH]

^^ Theres a deadline sometime at the beginning of December.

We've got a glut of clients trying to get us to complete structural reports saying that they can have as many PVs on their roof as possible. Trouble is most roofs aren't designed to take the additional weight.

[maviczap]

Too late for me then

Although I reckon my roof would be fine for quite a few, and on both sides as the sun rises on one side and sets on the other. Plus we get loads of sunshine.

Another time

[flymo]

yep, you need to have them installed and the chosen energy company needs to have received your Feed In Tariff application before 12th December. After that the payment drops to about half of what it is now.

It can still be worthwhile with energy prices going upwards as they are now, the only thing that changes is the payback period.

[flymo]

the cool thing is that they pay me 43.3p for every unit of electricity I generate, even if I then consume that electricity!

[flymo]

ok, 1 year on so I thought I would provide an update as to how this investment has gone.

Well, its almost a year. We've generated what we estimated we would do in one year with about two or three weeks to spare which is encouraging for the investment forecast we did.

I compared our electricity consumption from Aug 2010 to Aug 2011, before the panels, and it was approx 6500 kWh. Huge. Between Aug 2011 and today that has fallen to 2500 kWh. Now that's a massive reduction in anybody's estimation. It translates to a fall from £1500 per year to around £500.

In a year we've generated just over 3400 kWh and it hasn't been the best of years for sunshine. That has earned us around £1500 in feed in tariff payments.

The best bit, I haven't bought a single unit of electricity (taking solar generation into account) since the beginning of March. My meter reads less than it did at the end of March.

Happy? oh yes.

[maviczap]

Begs the question as to why every house in the UK isn't fitted with some panels instead of putting up all these wind farms?

[pookie]

because mr eon , mr eds and mr npower will get all upset by the reduction in consumption and hence drop in profits. If they had a windfarm they can claim the rise in cost of electricity is to cover the new investment.

I see a lot of new builds with with a few panels enough to cover the fridge freezer but not to feed back into the grid. I'm still waiting for my water bill to drop due to the surplus of raw materials..cant see that happening