Can I ask how much the solar cost? Looking to do something very similar when we extend up over the garage next year…. A solar company told us only to go to 3kw but Im thinking of future proofing
Fronius GEN24 PlusWhat make is the inverter
Yeh. Imagine Greta appearing on your doorstep, giving you the Greta thousand yard stare. Saying nothing. Just the stare. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.Go for it, you'll get pittance of a feed-in-tarrif but if you have to retire the roof in standard slate you might as well go for the PV slate. Energy prices will only go one way and you'll sleep better knowing that Greta doesn't hate you.
I can see the headline now.Solar installation on roof complete, just a bit of field wiring and second slave inverter to fit in the garage to complete
Once the scaffolding is gone, no one can see it , unless you are flying into Manchester.
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All makes sense, we make about 3200 kwh pa of a 4kw system. The battery will help a lot as solar PV produces little in the four months of the year when your demand is highest. Ditto in the summer when most of us use little during the peak hours of sunshine.Approx £9.5k with no battery, and no scaffolding (already up).
The solar panels are £2.3k and the hybrid inverter £2.2k
The rest is the mounting frames over 1K, then all the cables, monitoring stuff, installation etc.
So was surprised that the actual panels themselves not that expensive.
Couldn't see the point of a smaller system, the calcs indicate it should generate 5651 kWh a year. Currently we use 6640 kWh a year.
Of course without a battery we will loose a chunk, and get a bit back on feed in tariff we can't use.
Future plan will be adding hot water storage to our combi. Fortunately we have a fancy Danish boiler that this can be added, so will reduce gas hot water heating costs.
Then the Mrs new plug in hybrid can take some.
Working from home, so dishwasher, washing machine etc during the day.
Then possibly battery storage but this is still very expensive really at £5k for a 7.68Kwh system.
It was really a now or never, can't see the costs getting cheaper when a chunk is actually installation, and can we see electricity prices coming down?
All makes sense, we make about 3200 kwh pa of a 4kw system. The battery will help a lot as solar PV produces little in the four months of the year when your demand is highest
All makes sense, we make about 3200 kwh pa of a 4kw system. The battery will help a lot as solar PV produces little in the four months of the year when your demand is highest. Ditto in the summer when most of us use little during the peak hours of sunshine.
I use more than my system generates even in summer but the battery appeals largely as a way of coping with rural power cuts and future EV charging as you say.
I’ve wondered that and how you wire it up with preferences. For me I would want it to fire my boilers and hot water/downstairs heating pumps and then kitchen sockets but that might be too bespoke. Alternatively I presume that it just feeds into your system and you need to turn off what you don’t need?Curious: How big is the battery in terms of days to run the house?
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I’ve wondered that and how you wire it up with preferences. For me I would want it to fire my boilers and hot water/downstairs heating pumps and then kitchen sockets but that might be too bespoke. Alternatively I presume that it just feeds into your system and you need to turn off what you don’t need?
In general if you go solar they advise you to get solar water heaters and gas cooking as those are two large electricity consumers so ideally you need to take those “off grid”. You would need a huge battery system to be able to run the house plus heating plus cooking.That would be my logic too, being in rural Ireland power outages are not uncommon, probably once every couple of months for anywhere between 2 and 8 hours so something that could provide basic power in those periods would be a big win here.
In general if you go solar they advise you to get solar water heaters and gas cooking as those are two large electricity consumers so ideally you need to take those “off grid”. You would need a huge battery system to be able to run the house plus heating plus cooking.
We have regular “load shedding” which means we get cut off for 2.5 hours up to 3-4 times per day and with my 20 250W panels and 16 Lead acid batteries (10KWh practical capacity) we can manage that as the batteries charge up after each 2.5 hrs cut off if it’s at night. During the day the solar system will hack it with only very limited battery use if we time the washing machine/dryer/pool pump. Lithium batteries are the way to go now as they have many more charge cycles and also you can run them down to 10% whereas Lead Acid batteries should not be used below 50% charge if you want them to last. Also panel capacity has more than doubled to ~600W so you can get away with less panels (or bigger capacity on the same area).