I am led to hold which with a supervision intrigue it has turn tasteful to deposit in solar panels for your house. The designation costs have been around £12,000 as well as we hold we usually benefit after about twenty-five or thirty years. Does any one know if there have been any calculations upon price as well as income saved over this duration of time? It is positively a prolonged tenure investment. we would similar to to see a calcualtions prior to we outlay this kind of money! Can any one help? Thanks
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UK reply
We have installed solar panels that we own so know how the system works, as long as you are in Southern England, the further south you are the more money you make. Ideal position is facing due South, but SW – SE is OK. We are SSW.
"Free" panels are just that. The house owner gets the "free" use of electricity generated so you can save on your electric bill.
However to fully benefit you have to be careful when you use electricity. For example if you use a washing machine / dishwasher / tumble dryer at night when the panels aren’t generating you don’t/can’t get free electricity! During a sunny day the panels might be generating 1kw but if you switch on a 2kw appliance you pay for the excess1kw needed to run the appliance.
So yes you will save some money on your electric bill but probably only 40% certainly not 100% of your bill.
The owner of the panels (i.e us!) is the one to benefit. We have a 4kWh system (biggest allowed under Government subsidy) and get paid +/-46p per kilowatt hour generated. This is guaranteed by the Government for 25 years!
We all buy electricity from the Power Companies at 12-14p unit so it is a huge subsidy – which the rest of you are paying – not the Government – one reason why bills are so expensive now!
As a generalisation the capital cost was £12,000 but I expect to earn +/- £1600 year. To put another way although I still buy some electricity (at night time for example) and all gas in effect we will be getting all our energy "for free" and about £600 extra cash in hand!
We have gas heating (now only for space heating) but now heat our water electrically with combination of offpeak electricity at night (5p/unit) and from our panels during the day.
If you have the cash BUY YOUR OWN as the scheme is Government guaranteed for 25 years!
In investment terms it is a 8-12% TAX FREE return for 25 years – you can’t get anything like that anywhere else.
If you want more specific help email me and I can do the figures for your house and send some pictures of our installation, which took less than one day with minimal inconvenience.
Basically you have the panels on your roof, an inverter(converts the panels DC output to AC mains) in your loft, a conduit running down to your consumer unit and input meter. If it is carefully done all you can see is a conduit down your outside wall.
P.S. Even on dull days it still generates. Recently on a rainy grey overcast day we were still generating about 240w. So in January when it will be freezing with perhaps snow on the ground as long as the sun is shining we will be generating! It converts light to power – heat is not needed to make it work!
We have been running 8 weeks and generated 900kWh so far, that is about £400 to come from our Power Company!
Yes do it
the installation cost is very high although the operational cost is low so i cant install it.
The trouble is that it is so expensive to have installed and as you say it will take many years before you actually start saving above what the installation cost was, I personally would not go ahead and make that sort of investment, it would be more profitable to keep the money in a building society, get the interest from it and use that to pay for your electricity but the main thing that I have against solar Panels is that unless you stay in that house for at least twenty five years you will not reach the point where you are saving and to capitalise on it you would have to stay there for many years more, so you will not have the option of moving house without losing your investment and at the moment having solar panels does not increase the value of the property, it is just a good selling point, when you buy your new house, you would probably have to start all over again and then because of the years will never live long enough to reap any benefit from it.
In the long term yes it is…..
No. Figures are available, somewhere. At the moment, in the UK, they are not viable.
Id say its not worth installing solar panels to your house, theyre only really good on new houses being built where the cost seems insignificant if its a large house eg £12000 is insignificant if your building a 500k house
If you are mainly interested in reducing your fuel bills the first thing is to install draught proofing as terms of bang for your bucks this is the single biggest difference you can make, then go for loft insulation, then double or triple glazing ideally with argon or krypton gas in the void. After that cavity wall insulation and then we get into trickier arithmetic. I believe that photo-voltaic cells are more cost effective than the older solar panels but it may be touch and go whether these are worthwhile above a certain latitude, air or ground source heat pumps may be more cost effective and windmills may be worth thinking about in terms of selling the power you generate on to the the grid.
If you are going to spend serious money it would worth paying for professional advice rather than risk making an expensive boo-boo.
Please take replies from the USA with a grain of salt. We don’t have your generous feed-in tariff, and some respondents will not take that into consideration. In addition to looking at the analysis which a local solar installer will provide, I would suggest walking your neighborhood and finding a house that has solar installed, then chatting with them in-depth about their experience.
My father fitted a hot water solar system for £4000, parts only mind, being we use so much energy for heating water I can’t help but think people should go for hot water before they opt for PV. Ofcourse no feedback tariff on hot water though.
In answer to your question Id on’t know sorry.
http://the-environment.org.uk/further_info/how_solar_power_help_environment.html
In hotter countries I thinks their are bigger gains to be made, in places like malta they have to cover up their panels in the summer or they get too hot!
it is worth it……coz u get to save so much power….its rlly imp..before all the fuel runs out !
I think it would be a great idea to get solar panels. It may be a lot of money to buy them, but in the longrun you will be saving a lot! Plus it is green for the enviroment. But you will need something that will store the power for a few days so when the suns not out you can still have power. Overall it’s a great idea!!
Not worth at all, till solar panels become more efficient in energy tapping and cheaper.
We live in an uncertain world, with uncertain times, I’d think ten times before I part with that kind of money, who really knows what the future holds, "if any", the way things are heading at the moment!