Nice people thread part 4 - sugar and spice and all things

michaels

What flavour of $? When I was working FT I could save about 2k a month living extremely frugally so nothing like 500k in 5 years

Generali

michaels wrote: »

What flavour of $? When I was working FT I could save about 2k a month living extremely frugally so nothing like 500k in 5 years

Aussie.

Mrs G is starting on $50,000 and should get $5,000 rises every 6 months for 3 years. If we save it @ 6% then that's ball park $500,000 assuming we pay for trips back to Europe from Mrs Generali's money. If we save the lot it could be more like $800,000.

Generali

tomterm8 wrote: »

Have a good life, then. Generali. All sounds quite a good idea.

Thanks tomterm8.

I'll check in periodically.

lostinrates

Generali wrote: »

Thanks tomterm8.

I'll check in periodically.

you better!

Take care dear thing.

LydiaJ

The first panel is now on. There have been two problems so far, but I've been impressed with how well they've dealt with them (although rather less impressed with their head office's ability to communicate).

When the bloke was here weeks ago looking at the roof, he failed to notice that the soil stack was in the middle of where the panels need to go. I'm therefore having to have two sets of 8 panels with a gap between, rather than one block of 16 panels. Nobody realised this until the guys arrived today, but they quickly made a new plan to wire up the two sets of 8, and everything is now going ahead.

The other problem is that the supplier didn't deliver the panels to the company that are fitting them for me, so I was rung up a few days ago and asked to choose between waiting until October for the panels I'd ordered, or having an upgrade to more expensive panels on the day we'd booked. I went for the upgrade. But head office didn't communicate that properly to the logisitics people. So we've got the upgraded panels here, but the caps for the mounting rails are too big - they're the right size for the panels I was supposed to have but didn't. Still, they've sorted it remarkably quickly, and everything's going ahead.

It does rather help that these same guys will be back here tomorrow to do my next-door neighbour's panels, so any little thing that they can't do today they can come back and finish off quickly tomorrow.

lostinrates

LydiaJ wrote: »

having an upgrade to more expensive panels on the day we'd booked. I went for the upgrade. .

what is the difference between the panels/outputs?

edit: it occurs to me this is a fab way to teach kids an aspect of physics in the home, and how to work out financial implications of different Rated things, and what that is in cost.

LydiaJ

[geek mode]

There's not much difference between the panels. Well, there may be, but it's very hard to tell. They all have official ratings that tell you how they perform under rather artificial test conditions, and they're labelled according to that. So you can get a system that's officially 4.0kWp with Hyundai panels (which I've now got) or pay quite a bit more to get a system that's officially 4.0kWp with Sanyo panels, which some people think will actually perform better under real life conditions.

(Wp and kWp are watts-peak and kilowatts-peak, and refer to the power output in bright sunshine.)

I was originally going to have a nominally 3.92kWp system with Suntech panels, but the fact that the system would have been 3.92kWp rather than 4.0kWp isn't anything to do with the quality of the panels. Sanyo and Hyundai make 250Wp panels, so 16 of them make 4.0kWp. Suntech make 245Wp panels, so you can't make 4.0kWp with a whole number of them, and 16 panels make 3.92kWp. Sanyo also do a 235Wp panel - you can use 16 of them to get 3.76kWp. Other companies make much smaller panels (smaller both in power rating and in physical size) - Solar Century make a 185Wp panel, so you can use 21 of them to get 3.885kWp. You have to stay at or below 4.0kWp to get the best feed in tariff - larger installations (eg on commercial building) are paid at a lower rate.

I'm happy to have Hyundais, but I suspect it doesn't really make all that much difference. My neighbour is paying the extra for Sanyos, although I'm not sure if he was going to have the whole roof covered to get the max 4.0kWp. Meanwhile, my friend at work decided to get Sanyos because her roof is rather small and she can only fit just over 3kWp on there, so it's worth getting the Sanyos because they're smaller for the same amount of power output, so you can fit more generating power on the size of roof available.

[/geek mode]

A few of them are making hammering noises up in the loft, and the rest have gone for lunch now. There are 4 panels on the roof so far.

StevieJ

Good luck Gen, I wish you well, please stay in contact, superficially at least.

Generali

StevieJ wrote: »

Good luck Gen, I wish you well, please stay in contact, superficially at least.

Cheers Mr J.

I might stay in touch. We'll see.

It's funny really, when I moved to Aus posters misinterpreted my goodbye as an 'I'm not posting any more'. I didn't want to disappoint so I went along with it.

Anyhoo, what happens will happen. Good luck all and I'll see you when I see you.


Genxxx

Generali

lostinrates wrote: »

you better!

Take care dear thing.

Thanks LIR.

I might/will. I'll certainly be back eventually.