Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Harte
Richard, it's very good that even in winter that you are generating enough for your own purposes and even exporting some, all of which will be helping enormously with your utilities' bills.
However, do or will your savings ever cover the costs involved in having them installed? I ask because some reports I have seen say that it could be decades before some who have them will see an actual return on them, by which time they will probably need replacing.
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They weren't cheap (we had an 11 panel array and a 5kWH battery) but on the estimates they gave us we'd get about a 7% return on the capital utilised. As milady had all her cash in a basic Santander account earning Zilch, and had resisted my attempts to get her to move it to something getting about 5%, I didn't argue when she said she wanted to go ahead with it. As it is, so far we seem to be ahead of the predicted output (4000kWh pa), having only had them installed on 23/2/24 - and the one sunny week we had a couple of weeks ago we got daily output of high 20s/ low 30s kWh - so I'm hopeful for reasonable performance for the better part of the year. (Of course today was crap - only about 7 kWh generated - given the wind, we should have had a turbine
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We also have a tariff with Octopus that pays us a higher export tariff in peak hours (4-7pm) and a lower buy-in tariff between 2-6am, so the controller is set to discharge the battery to the grid at the peak period, and top it up overnight in the cheap period. Its early days yet, we haven't had the first full month bills yet as EON (our old provider) have dragged their heels, but we did get paid £17.54 for the 91kWh we exported between 12 and 26 March - the first 2 weeks we were on the tariff.
Allegedly having the panels fitted should also boost the value of the house - if only because it improves the energy rating of the place - but I have no real evidence for that.
We'll see how it works out in the next few months, I guess. The panels and battery have a minimum 10 year guarantee, but they supposedly typically last longer than that - which is more than I probably will.......