Solar panels and battery - any real world reccomendations?

Journey said:
I'll drop a link for the smaller one later, but the one I am trying to look at is the AirForce 1kW model. Obviously it is more expensive, and needs a proper tower for installation. Here is the product and here is a video of one being erected on a pole and installed. Looking at over £3.5k now due to price increase across the year, but its a very long term investment.
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Probably not suitable for a housing estate, especially if that noise at the end of the video is what it makes, mind you it would barely fit in my back garden. Ideal if in the country side, or have a really big garden and well spaced out neighbours.
 
Worst day for generation so far, just all rain and no sun at all today, 1.5 kwh only!

Battery gone flat by 21:00, so I expect to see more days like this going forwards. After this I have to budget 0.5 - 0.6 kwh draw from the grid, so it won't be insane cost, but will use a handful of extra £0.40/kwh units each day I think, and it could be a few extra if I use more power on things like cooking, gaming, TV etc.

I can probably load shift some things like dish washer and washing machine to coincide with off-peak rates more often than not, and most of my units will still be off-peak ones, so it's a net win regardless.
 
My usage is about 16 kwh/day, so on a poor day like this, I'll need to roughly 13.333r kwh for the 20 hours that I am on-peak. Battery stores about 8 kwh so that leaves gap of 5.333r kwh. Day like today where I generated 1.5, it's leaving a gap of 3.833r kwh. £1.53 worth roughly for on-peak for the day.

Battery should stretch further on a week day if I am working because I'll only be using my work laptop and my monitor and things, a weekend or day off I will use more for watching TV or gaming.
 
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Done my 1 year calculations to work out savings.

This time last year I went from Solar, Diesel Van and "normal" Octopus to Solar, Tesla Battery, EV and Octopus Go.

I've gone very conservative on my savings estimates, using price of £1.60/L for diesel and an electric rate of 25p. I've saved £2950!

This past year has cost £595. Assuming similar usage and generation this year will cost me £960 with the increased Go rate. However the savings this year are likely to be greater if you use a more accurate basic unit rate and diesel costs. So, a sub 5 year ROI easily for anybody spending £15k on an install now if they drive 15k miles annually and have access to Octopus Go.


 
Seems most of your savings are coming from the EV usage, which makes a lot of sense if you are using it to drive 15K miles per annum.

Ultimately I think whether high EV or high domestic usage (or both) Solar and battery tech is amazing for saving money and doing some good for the environment whilst at it, the low usage people won't hit the same kind of payback periods we would.

Which is why sometimes things like this don't really make a huge deal of sense to me - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-63300680

The person in this article has a full solar and battery system and is presumably part of a housing estate for social housing where you can imagine it hasn't cost them anything as it's part of the scheme, as the article describes it they've cut their electric bill from £20 a week down to £10 a week. For the cost of £10000-15000 for the installation (probably optimistically cheap), they are saving £520 a year, a payback period of an insanely long period of time.

This level of kit is kind of wasted here, schemes to install solar into the homes of heavy users should be prioritised over things like this in my view.

In this article they are talking about spending £25000 - £55000 to retrofit homes, which also sounds incredibly expensive and has no basis for testing how much these homes actually use or what benefit can be reached with them - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53022696.

Solar and battery tech is amazing but it should be deployed where it makes the most sense to do so, location as well as usage patterns.
 
HungryHippos said:
Seems most of your savings are coming from the EV usage, which makes a lot of sense if you are using it to drive 15K miles per annum.

Ultimately I think whether high EV or high domestic usage (or both) Solar and battery tech is amazing for saving money and doing some good for the environment whilst at it, the low usage people won't hit the same kind of payback periods we would.

Which is why sometimes things like this don't really make a huge deal of sense to me - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-63300680

The person in this article has a full solar and battery system and is presumably part of a housing estate for social housing where you can imagine it hasn't cost them anything as it's part of the scheme, as the article describes it they've cut their electric bill from £20 a week down to £10 a week. For the cost of £10000-15000 for the installation (probably optimistically cheap), they are saving £520 a year, a payback period of an insanely long period of time.

This level of kit is kind of wasted here, schemes to install solar into the homes of heavy users should be prioritised over things like this in my view.

In this article they are talking about spending £25000 - £55000 to retrofit homes, which also sounds incredibly expensive and has no basis for testing how much these homes actually use or what benefit can be reached with them - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53022696.

Solar and battery tech is amazing but it should be deployed where it makes the most sense to do so, location as well as usage patterns.
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In the link you have attched for wales, the houses dont all have solar panels, but they all have batteries installed….so the savings are 10 per week, per household and any extra production goes back to the housing association to pay towards more solar and batteries on other estates. I think every other house has panels, but only if they agree to have them on their roof.
 
HungryHippos said:
Seems most of your savings are coming from the EV usage, which makes a lot of sense if you are using it to drive 15K miles per annum.
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Yes. I worked out I needed to go "all in" to maximise the savings. Fortunately it's working. Sticking in 34p/unit and £1.85L puts my estimated savings for the coming year at £3300. The bulk of that being because of the EV. Electric savings at £550 which is slightly more than this year.
 
I'm getting conflicting information as to why Hybrid Inverters are better than AC coupled Inverter. For reference the system I got quoted was 16 panels, 3 on one roof, 13 on another, with optimisation for shade, 9.5kwh batt. They quoted for AC coupled.
 
3.3 for me today. Fortunately we had 2 periods of clear skys between the rain. Get ready for January, historically that's the worst month for me.

Daily averaging:
2020 - 3.2
2021 - 4.9
2022 - 4.9
 
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