Could we make savings going solar?

tori.k

We are due to have Solar fitted but im unsure due to the house and our lifestyle if we will actually benefit or lose from fitting it.

At the moment our 3 bed all electric is running on a E7 meter, heating is provided by woodstove and 1 nightstorage heater in the hall for a couple of months during the coldest part of the year, water is heated by an immersion water heater run overnight and this feeds the showers I do all our washing and run the dishwasher during the cheaper night hours.

Without the night storage heater we use around 22 units most on the cheaper night rate every 24hrs

We are out of the house Mon-Fri from 7am till 6pm each day.

so the majority of our electric use is in the evenings, the solar chap tell's us to ditch the E7 and go onto a standard tariff and we will save money, this make's no sense to me as I still need to run the immersion water heater and sometimes the nightstorage heater over night for hot water for the showers in the morning and this is our biggest electricity cost.

Im being dense I know but as far as I can see it's only our daytime weekend use that we would actually save and we are hardly home at weekends. This is a rental so we wont benefit from the FIT's I have no issue with panels as long as it doesn't cost me more longterm.

Anybody in the know about these things please.

DragonQ

No idea about solar or how feed-in tariffs work but the other part of your question is easily solved: plug your day and night annual kWh figures into a comparison website and see if E7 tariffs are cheaper or not.

Pincher

Meter readings from September 2013, minus September 2012?


Peak ???? kWh
Off-peak ???? kWh


Typical humanities student, will go round Cape Horn rather than do maths.

tori.k

we used 7287 units over the last year.

Peak 3043 KWH
Off-Peak 4244 KWH

we are currently fixed with E-ON V1 that ends in December it has a 25.99 standing charge 16.905 day rate and 6.531 night.

We haven't had any info from E-on about the current price rises but with our fixed deal is soon ending anyway so seems a good time to change the meter if it's worth it, the solar will be installed in the next few weeks (weather permitting) but definitely before the end of December due to the FITS being dropped again in January.

tori.k

Pincher wrote: »

Meter readings from September 2013, minus September 2012?


Peak ???? kWh
Off-peak ???? kWh


Typical humanities student, will go round Cape Horn rather than do maths.

It's not reluctance to do the math, we changed from E7 to standard in our last house as it worked out slightly cheaper as i was home more due to working nights, I just don't understand the impact of solar panels, I can't seem to grasp how a grid tied system works at all.