Solar panels and battery - any real world reccomendations?

British Gas are estimating my annual electricity usage at 7300 kWh. From the 5th of April to the 30th April I used 464 kWh and then to the 15th of May I used 296 kWh.

It's going to be around £6095 for 5.46kW Solar PV: 14 x 390W Panel 'Trina Vertex S' System. Another £800 for Solaredge if I want it but I don't think I do as it's for shading and I don't have any massive trees etc. Then the Voltage Optimiser is £600. They estimate 5247 kWh per year electricity production.

I'm not even sure where to start working out if it's worth it or not. Our 3-5 year moving plan is on hold for the foreseeable.

We both work from home, I have a lot of tech running 24/7: NAS x2, Xeon Server x2, 10 Gb switches 24/7, an i7 PC 24/7, music, TVs on during the day. No EV.
 
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ChrisD. said:
British Gas are estimating my annual electricity usage at 7300 kWh. From the 5th of April to the 30th April I used 464 kWh and then to the 15th of May I used 296 kWh.

It's going to be around £6095 for 5.46kW Solar PV: 14 x 390W Panel 'Trina Vertex S' System. Another £800 for Solaredge if I want it but I don't think I do as it's for shading and I don't have any massive trees etc. Then the Voltage Optimiser is £600. They estimate 5247 kWh per year electricity production.

I'm not even sure where to start working out if it's worth it or not. Our 3-5 year moving plan is on hold for the foreseeable.

We both work from home, I have a lot of tech running 24/7: NAS x2, Xeon Server x2, 10 Gb switches 24/7, an i7 PC 24/7, music, TVs on during the day. No EV.
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Why do you need all that tech running 24/7?..
 
Im just trying to work out if its worth getting a solar generator and 400w panel, just to run the tv, skyq, soundbar all day…..as grid power is currently 0.51p/kwh.

tv, soundbar and skyq is pulling around 100watts and hour.
 
@Welshman 51p per kWh is extremely expensive, why are you paying that much, price cap is 30p, unless you've signed up for a rather expensive fixed price agreement?
 
ChrisD. said:
Amazing contributions to the thread and question here, standard OcUK.
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46 pages of similar questions and answers. Nobody can tell you if you think spending your money on solar is worth it, other than you as it's your money. Ultimately that is nearly all people ask about the money side of things, where it was super low on my priority list. Spend it if you want to, don't if you don't. Do you only want it to save money, zero other reasons?
 
Well rather than spending thousands for lower cost of running the house the suggestions have been maybe to reduce usage. Which to be honest is ridiculously high

Do you even have a question as it seems idle musing and if you do plan to move in 3-5 yrs then pay back won’t work. If you don’t then who knows. It’s not hard to work it out. Or you expecting others to ?
 
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Welshman said:
So if the rigs are off, how are you still pulling that much power??
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A large weed grow in the attic using the old sodiums? :p

But yea @mattyg that is some insane usage! :eek:

I would say a lot of it comes from the electric underfloor heating, we have some in the Conservatory, which i recently turned off and usage has gone from around 10k to 7.5k KW/H a year
 
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ChrisD. said:
DeAmazing contributions to the thread and question here, standard OcUK.
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It's very difficult to quantify how much you'd save, I have a 4kw system currently, and IIRC it's saving £600 a year in electric at current rates, I'm sure I posted a more thorough breakdown recently, have a look through my previous posts.

If you're going to be moving in the next 6 years or so then it's probably not worth it, but that depends on how much prices rise, or even drop, but that could be wishful thinking.
 
Heheh! Well we're in a six bedroom and I thought our 12,000kwh a year was bad, but you made me feel like a noob girl!

I can't quite figure out where you usage comes from - we have an EV, electric underfloor in a couple of rooms, 3 NAS, 7 PCs and so on. We both work from home with triple and quadruple monitors on. You must be able to aim at saving £10k or so per year without much effort??

Have you thought about getting a pile of smart plugs? I've saved a fair whack with these by automatically shutting off all the main energy pieces every night (eg TV media area with all its gadgets)

Still scratching my head as to how you get to your figure! Fascinated to understand !
 
Large five bedrooms here. Two rooms with electric underfloor heating, which we never use. Two fridge freezers, 10gb switch. 1gb switch, router, modem, WiFi AP x 2, cinema room used 3 evenings a week,, server (disks gradually increased to 22 over the last year), large plasma TV used with media PC (mostly used in the evening), bedroom TV with media PC used for about an hour every night. From October I had a 3080 GPU mining 24/7 (switched off last week). Washing machine, dish washer, tumble dryer (rarely used). A multitude of computers, and since May 2021 they've been used for plotting Chia.We don't work from home, but our daughter doesn't work full time.Most weekday evenings my main computer is on for about 2 hours, with twin monitors.

15/03/2021 to 14/03/2022

Imported 6583kWh of electric
Generated 4112kwh of electric (4kw array)
Exported 2008kwh

Actual usage 8687kwh

I've no idea how some of you use so much electric, and why you'd need TVs on all day, that in itself uses a lot.
 
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