Solar Panel Guide Discussion

don0301

MrInvestor wrote: »

I understand the payback on Solar Thermal Panels can be as little as 5 years now! So if you invest £2500 to have them installed, including the heat exchange equipment, you'll be saving around £500 off your heating bill a year (so I hear). They still work when it is overcast. If you live in a house, it sounds like it is worth doing!!

Photovoltaic solar panels/tiles have a longer payback in the UK, because they hardly produce any electricity when it is overcast. How many really sunny days do we have a year? The technology also costs a lot more. Maybe this will improve over the next 5 years.

I pay £30 a month for Gas. that''ll be £360 a year then.

that covers a Gas hob, Gas central heating and Gas water heating.

so how do I save £500 a year? figures please

Dave_Fowler

You'd need over 14,000 kWh of sunshine at 100% efficiency and 100% utilization to achieve £500 a year saving on energy alone. Perhaps the £500 is based on a guesstimate of the savings after the new (as yet unannounced) generation tariffs come into force next autumn.

Dave F

jamesingram

Yes, i think mr investor might be bankrupted rather soon if thats his investing tip for 2012

Cardew

MrInvestor wrote: »

I understand the payback on Solar Thermal Panels can be as little as 5 years now! So if you invest £2500 to have them installed, including the heat exchange equipment, you'll be saving around £500 off your heating bill a year (so I hear). They still work when it is overcast. If you live in a house, it sounds like it is worth doing!!

Photovoltaic solar panels/tiles have a longer payback in the UK, because they hardly produce any electricity when it is overcast. How many really sunny days do we have a year? The technology also costs a lot more. Maybe this will improve over the next 5 years.

Welcome to the forum!

Solar Thermal, as it is termed only provides Domestic Hot Water(DHW) for taps - i.e. not heating.

The Government commissioned tests of 10 systems(in Southern UK) for a 12 month period. They saved on average 1,000kWh per year - most of those savings in Summer. In winter virtually nothing - even with the highest output evacuated tube design.

So if you have gas you will save between, say £35 and £50pa depending on the efficiency of your boiler.

If you rely on electricity you should be on E7 so £50-£60pa. Those figures are roughly in line with the figures WHICH produce.

You can of course have bigger systems which will supply all your hot water in summer but still virtually nothing in winter. So at the outside you might save, say £80 on DHW.

Don't forget that you have to run the pump and electronics on day rate electricity.

Isn't it strange that the solar salesmen don't seem to mention the Governments tests;) They prefer to rely on savings 'up to' £xxx phrases.

P.S.
If you give me £2,500 I will invest it for you at a rate of 'up to' 37.8%

orrery

Are any of Sunny Explorer users finding it a horribly buggy?

I'm finding incomplete graphs, spurious results recorded and data mis-allocated between days. Only forcing a time update on the inverter, deleting local data and requesting a complete re-export of all data fixes the issue. This process is sometimes required every day.

SMA support acknowledge an issue, saying that it is due to the inverter and PC having slightly different times. The difference must be very slight in that I can't see much more than seconds between them.

A system reporting data that gives completely spurious results is about as useful as a chocolate fire-guard.

Valeria12

Solar energy has been increasing in popularity over the years as more and more people are becoming eco-conscious. Solar energy is a great option energy solution to our current polluting methods. Solar panels are devices which are used to change sunlight into energy by collecting solar radiation from the sun which then converts the energy to electricity for consumption.

davidanddeirdre

Valeria12 wrote: »

Solar energy has been increasing in popularity over the years as more and more people are becoming eco-conscious. Solar energy is a great option energy solution to our current polluting methods. Solar panels are devices which are used to change sunlight into energy by collecting solar radiation from the sun which then converts the energy to electricity for consumption.

Solar PV is a fantastic investment at the current rate of FIT- I speak from experience, it is currently 11% pa simple interest for us. In the winter as mentioned by a lot of correspondants above, it is limited. It does surprise me sometimes, see below, but currently our 10 panels are only providing about 25% of our daily usage and of course none at all during the evening when most of it is needed.

In future though I will be looking forward to snowy weather- PROVIDED I can get the stuff off the panels- because the amount of light bouncing around the clouds off the ground while snow lies gives cloudy day totals at least 3 X what they would have been otherwise.

ronlizpatsimon

The minor requirements for good generation are:-
1. size of system in KW.
2. Angle nearest to South.
3. Angle of Slope

The major requirement is a sunny day. This is where the UK is often cheated. Just have a look at the Google "Clouds" you can add to your home page. It is a "live" picture from space of the earth below (any part of the world). You will usually see that the UK gets more cloud than any other area. Usually more than Russia, Asia, Canada, Africa, South America or the Pacific.
The main reason appears to be that big clouds form off the southern coast of Greenland. They then go to Iceland and at that point are heading harmlessly for Norway. This is where it is unfair. Just after passing Iceland they do a sharp right turn and with great malice quickly cover the UK.
As an athiest; I cannot even blame God!

Doc_N

ronlizpatsimon wrote: »

The minor requirements for good generation are:-
1. size of system in KW.
2. Angle nearest to South.
3. Angle of Slope

The major requirement is a sunny day. This is where the UK is often cheated. Just have a look at the Google "Clouds" you can add to your home page. It is a "live" picture from space of the earth below (any part of the world). You will usually see that the UK gets more cloud than any other area. Usually more than Russia, Asia, Canada, Africa, South America or the Pacific.
The main reason appears to be that big clouds form off the southern coast of Greenland. They then go to Iceland and at that point are heading harmlessly for Norway. This is where it is unfair. Just after passing Iceland they do a sharp right turn and with great malice quickly cover the UK.
As an athiest; I cannot even blame God!

For God's sake don't mention any of this to the Daily Express. They'll just add it to their list of arctic weather/conspiracy theories and then find some way of linking it with the death of Princess Diana.

davidanddeirdre

ronlizpatsimon wrote: »

The minor requirements for good generation are:-
1. size of system in KW.
2. Angle nearest to South.
3. Angle of Slope

The major requirement is a sunny day. This is where the UK is often cheated. Just have a look at the Google "Clouds" you can add to your home page. It is a "live" picture from space of the earth below (any part of the world). You will usually see that the UK gets more cloud than any other area. Usually more than Russia, Asia, Canada, Africa, South America or the Pacific.
The main reason appears to be that big clouds form off the southern coast of Greenland. They then go to Iceland and at that point are heading harmlessly for Norway. This is where it is unfair. Just after passing Iceland they do a sharp right turn and with great malice quickly cover the UK.
As an athiest; I cannot even blame God!

This business of cloudiness is very interesting, and in my experience so far (nearly 12 months) there is no such thing as a typical cloudy day. I try to record our daily output figure before it disappears off the inverter display, and the approximate daily outputs as a percentage of what is possible from full sun at the particular time of year for a day which is completely cloudy vary considerably. The maximum I have recorded was about 30%, which was Sunday last during the period of lying snow when the weather was very bright despite the cloud. The minimum was about 1 1/2% on December 23rd when it was very dull with rain nearly all day (total 0.06kW!). Also, a completely sunless day is actually quite rare, so monthly totals can be well over half what I estimate our system might be capable of with full sun, such as last June for example when despite there being only one day with full sun, we achieved a monthly total of 249kW which I estimate was about 65% (2/3) of the maximum possible (360 to 380kW). So it is not so bad for solar panels in the UK!