Solar Installation

21 Oct, 2022 | Updates

UPDATE OCTOBER: Solar energy generation for October was 212.67 kWh from the 4.5kW array

 

Many of you have asked about our solar panel installation which was installed in Early September this year, after I calculated that in theory it should pay back in ~11 years based on the calculations I did, see link below. This was based on the electricity supplier at the time British Gas and the prices per unit I was on then.

Solar Array Calculations

The process of the install all went okay, other than people should be aware that if being fitted to a slate roof, there will be some losses and as such will need spares, we ended up using around 30 new slates in total, not because the lads did a bad job but the existing slates were either already broken or cracked already.
The new PV Solar installation is working well and is helping us to reduce our dependance on the grid, which judging by the number of power cuts we have around here is not a bad thing, let alone what will probably happen this winter. The solar array itself is around 4.5kW with a 3.6kW hybrid inverter, plus a 13.4kW battery bank to make best use of what power is generated, as this helps balance it all out. We also added an electric vehicle charger and a Solar iBoost device for the immersion in the annex, which diverts electricity to the immersion when there is surplus power which would otherwise be bound for the grid. 
There have been a few teething issues with it, but all working well now and the guys came out and solved the issues very promptly. 
The roof faces SSW so pretty good for catching the sun, okay so the sun don’t shine much in the winter, but at least I can charge the batteries up at night on cheap rate grid power and use later when it would otherwise be peak rate.

Now when I started this, we were with both British Gas and SSE as we had two meter boxes, one for the House (with BG) and one for the Annex (with SSE). Now this was obviously costing us two standing charges and the hassle of dealing with two bills and what with the way the market was going that could be seen earlier in the year this just had to change but what….

It just happened that we had a chap stay with us who worked for Energy Local who was working locally at the Capel Dewi solar PV site and would we be interested in their energy supply idea, which they were offering in our area now in conjunction with Octopus. First thought was yeah right pull the other one, as seems too good to be true, but after some explaining of the principles and why ‘our’ energy prices are so ridiculously high we thought lets go for it, particularly as they are associated with Octopus Energy.

Lets put it this way British Gas were charging around 30p/kWh with a standing charge of say 50p/day whereas with EnergyLocal/Octopus we pay a variable tariff depending on the time of the day, but the average price is around 19p/kWh with a standing charge of 27p/day, so not a hard decision really.

The next step is to get the MCS certificate so I can contact Octopus for their export/outgoing tariff.

NB – It was the SSE meter that we kept, but changed provider and the BG meter was removed by BG themselves. However I didn’t reckon on British Gas being such a bunch of useless idiots, I wont go into the detail here but they were utterly useless and probably fraudulent in their activities, in the process of getting rid of them and afterwards. Even though they removed ‘their’ meter and I cancelled my account with them, they still tried to charge me for a supply and electricity usage, even tried to restart the direct debits (without a meter), very stressful!