Solar Together Quote

BG2022

NoobSolar said:

Regarding the collective scheme: I am not a fan. I hope once they have the £150 they don't come along and suddenly discover they need to quote a lot more. Installers who visited me took 5 to 15mins to determine what to do and what to offer. £150 is a rather high rate of pay for that, IMHO.

The £150 is to stop loads of people within the scheme getting quotes that they have no intention of following through on - at least that's what it says online. 

The bit about maxing out the roof is interesting. I don't really want to spend much more than about £8-9k and felt that best bet was to factor in a battery within that spend amount. Would you guys say better to lose the battery and max out panels if there was a direct trade off?

I'm not sure we'd be using tonnes of electricity when the solar is working its hardest as we don't have an electric car and often its just me working from home.

The alternative quote I've had from another provider is a 16 x 385w panels on a solar edge inverter system all installed with solar iBoost and pigeon mesh all for £8,535.

I'm struggling to work out whether better to go for more panels + more sophisticated system with solar edge, or the alternative which 14 panels with no solar edge but with a battery.

Thanks so much for help and input so far, its hard to find good independent advice so this is really appreciated.

MikeHEQA

Went through much the same process of solar, total beginner, ended up after so many different inverters and different size solar panels as we have large double garage spread over two roofs 7 panels went with 14 JA 380w panels and Solax X1 Boost 3.6kW inverter perfect solution with out too much shading and did not go for Solar Edge system which was way more expensive ... (without then a battery system, as there are so many of them as well to know actually our needs but will pursue that avenue later this year) plus iBoost+ and iBoost Buddy (added that later myself) for the Hot Water... really surprised since the September install, how well the iBoost+ performs and heats the water.
the only bad months with very little solar generation was December 41kWh followed by November and January, each producing 98 and 97 kWh respectively.  February was better at 135kWh but the big increase was March at over 356 kWh of generation.

Generation for April in only 9 days has generated 126.5 kWh, last two days both 21 kWh each.... roll on the summer.
the Solar Project is doing better than expected along with the solar EV charger Hypervolt 2.0 at 1.4kw @ 6amps.
Saved money not going Solar Edge, if looking for ROI think long and hard, not a factor for my decision, more Eco and Green.
Same for changing petrol 3 litre merc to EV, time to change.

2nd_time_buyer

Solarchaser said:

My gas is 7.5p now at roughly 75% efficiency. 
So somewhere around 9-10p/kwh
The best seg is I think 5.5p, so diverting to save gas makes food sense right now.
Unless your gas price is still the 2.5p mine was a year ago, then seg is better.

I agree with NoobSolar about getting max generation,  but there is a point where the cost of the *premium* panel outweighs its production vs a cheaper panel.
Either way, fill the roof!

Octopus is now 7.5p per kWh for export. Octopus Agile export has been averaging more than double that over the last 6 months.

But yes, fill your roof

Martyn1981

BG2022 said:

NoobSolar said:

Regarding the collective scheme: I am not a fan. I hope once they have the £150 they don't come along and suddenly discover they need to quote a lot more. Installers who visited me took 5 to 15mins to determine what to do and what to offer. £150 is a rather high rate of pay for that, IMHO.

The £150 is to stop loads of people within the scheme getting quotes that they have no intention of following through on - at least that's what it says online. 

The bit about maxing out the roof is interesting. I don't really want to spend much more than about £8-9k and felt that best bet was to factor in a battery within that spend amount. Would you guys say better to lose the battery and max out panels if there was a direct trade off?

I'm not sure we'd be using tonnes of electricity when the solar is working its hardest as we don't have an electric car and often its just me working from home.

The alternative quote I've had from another provider is a 16 x 385w panels on a solar edge inverter system all installed with solar iBoost and pigeon mesh all for £8,535.

I'm struggling to work out whether better to go for more panels + more sophisticated system with solar edge, or the alternative which 14 panels with no solar edge but with a battery.

Thanks so much for help and input so far, its hard to find good independent advice so this is really appreciated.

My opinion, feel free to ignore, but get as much PV as possible, as someone on here put it some time back 'nobody ever complained about having too much PV'. Small caveat, as panels get more efficient, it's possible to bump up against issues with the DNO (district network operator), but let's cross that bridge if we get to it. Hope I'm not being rude but your leccy consumption may go up in the future. You mention not having a BEV, but you may get one, you might heat water with PV in the non heating months. I have GCH, but use two small A/C units as heatpumps to heat the house off PV in the shoulder months. And going full circle (see next para), there's a good chance you'll get a battery in the future to make better use of the generation, when the time/price is right.

I love the idea of batts, but they are marginal at the moment, and can be added later, so if you haven't set your heart on it, then PV instead of panels, since altering PV later is proportionally very expensive due to scaffolding issues etc.

Solaredge - Both my systems have it, it's brilliant, it does exactly what it says on the tin, so I have no problem recommending it .... BUT .... if you don't have shading issues, then it's a grand+ more that you don't need to spend and won't get back.

Solarchaser

2nd_time_buyer said:

Solarchaser said:

My gas is 7.5p now at roughly 75% efficiency. 
So somewhere around 9-10p/kwh
The best seg is I think 5.5p, so diverting to save gas makes food sense right now.
Unless your gas price is still the 2.5p mine was a year ago, then seg is better.

I agree with NoobSolar about getting max generation,  but there is a point where the cost of the *premium* panel outweighs its production vs a cheaper panel.
Either way, fill the roof!

Octopus is now 7.5p per kWh for export. Octopus Agile export has been averaging more than double that over the last 6 months.

But yes, fill your roof

Ahh, thanks for the correction, I didn't realise it had went up.
Agile seg has always been quite good, however their import has been quite eye watering for a while.
Though I guess maybe not so eye-watering now considering current prices.

Patrol

Your quote looks OK, panels a little more than I paid perhaps (I was quoted ~£2800 for 7.2kWh Pylon batteries which seems cheap in comparison?) but I'm guessing prices have increased over the last 12 months.

Solar Together quoted us for panels  +battery. I asked them for a few variances and decided on more panels (11+5, 5.44kWh, ~£4950, quoted Mar 2021, installed April 2021, 2 strings, 2 scaffold, fireboard for inverter, upgrade to fuse board). I may be mistaken but the case for batteries appeared much weaker than panels both in terms of payback and expected life.

An export tariff with Octopus Agile looks a good option to me instead of batteries (a few months ago an update to Solis cloud monitoring started to show a chart or table view of Agile import and export prices, screenshot of the chart below but similar can be found from the regional pages at https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-outgoing-export/) 

Coastalwatch

Martyn1981 said:

My opinion, feel free to ignore, but get as much PV as possible, as someone on here put it some time back 'nobody ever complained about having too much PV'. Small caveat, as panels get more efficient, it's possible to bump up against issues with the DNO (district network operator), but let's cross that bridge if we get to it. Hope I'm not being rude but your leccy consumption may go up in the future. You mention not having a BEV, but you may get one, you might heat water with PV in the non heating months. I have GCH, but use two small A/C units as heatpumps to heat the house off PV in the shoulder months. And going full circle (see next para), there's a good chance you'll get a battery in the future to make better use of the generation, when the time/price is right.

I love the idea of batts, but they are marginal at the moment, and can be added later, so if you haven't set your heart on it, then PV instead of panels, since altering PV later is proportionally very expensive due to scaffolding issues etc.

Solaredge - Both my systems have it, it's brilliant, it does exactly what it says on the tin, so I have no problem recommending it .... BUT .... if you don't have shading issues, then it's a grand+ more that you don't need to spend and won't get back.

We have SE and agree with all Mart has said above. Something I might add though is that while PV arrays seldom throw up issues and hence a drop off in performance then SolarEdges monitoring system will identify at a glance which panel or string is being affected. Without it the installers will need to remove one panel at a time until they come across the culprit, be it panel, string or optimiser!

Just another issue for you to wrestle with.

Good fun, isn't it?

BG2022

thanks so much for all the collective input, honestly its an absolute minefield but I'm feeling a bit happier about what we are going to do.

Going to max out the panels with 16 on the roof with solar edge. We've got a double garage attached to the house which catches loads of sun so potentially would add on more panels down the line. Therefore feels sensible to spend the money on SE but have max flexibility.

In terms of battery I think we'll put the money into panels and wait and see on what we do with the battery. Would hate to spend all the money and find actually we are consuming most of it through working from home / if we bought an EV and the battery sits their doing relatively little. Hopefully in a couple of years the battery technology continues to improve and get cheaper and we'll add it on later.

Once again, thanks for the input from everyone. Hugely appreciate it.