These are three solar panels I had installed maybe as long as 20 years ago. We were early adopters of green technology and these were panels that heated your water – thus saving on gas bills.
They were a bad buy – they were pretty expensive, we were sold more than we needed and they packed up after a couple of years or so. And they have been sitting rather uselessly ever since.
It may be that we will move house in the next five years and duff solar panels aren’t a great selling point, and having inherited some money we also thought that having some new, working, photovoltaic panels might be a good idea.
So the scaffolding went up…
… and so did some blokes, and the old panels are scrap…
And we now have new ones providing electricity to a battery …
… from which we get our electricity if there is any in the battery (and if not, we get it from a supplier (Ecotricity – so renewable energy) just as before).
We’ll see how this goes. Fingers crossed! Here is where we are today just before posting this:
It’s a sunny morning and our solar panels are generating 2.18kW but the house is only using 0.38kW so the balance, 1.80kW is topping up our battery which is 74% full (and my phone battery is 59% full). Before lunchtime our battery will be full (I reckon) and we’ll be exporting to the grid and (once the paperwork is done) getting paid for it. The battery will be depleted overnight with freezer, fridge and wi-fi running but it will still see us through until mid morning and if it’s another sunny day then we go round a similar loop again. Rainy, cloudy December days will be different!
Our installer was GENR8energy – see the team here and here is their domestic solar page.
Here are our new panels (and you can see our neighbour has panels too) but we have the luck of being the half of the semi-detached house with a south-facing roof:
