Solar Panel Quote Help! Is This The Right Amount?

I used Red Electrical in Chorley (Lancashire). I don't know if they still travel as far as the West Midlands, nor whether they're now booked up until end of March, but they do seem able to do a complete install in 1 to 2 days, and provide an MCS certificate on the same day as the install finishes.


I submitted my feed in tariff application online on the evening of the day the install finished, Scottish Power then (eventually) recorded me as registered from that date.



Yes you will need an EPC to register for feed in tariff - there are websites you can check if your house already has one that's recent enough.

The fit form has to match the mcs certificate which will declare the 4.1kw, this isn't a problem for the fit though as the band pays the same up to 10kw. It's only the dno that cares about this.

I am using 2 geo minim led version displays to monitor generation and grid supply. I found the ct clamp versions of several monitors to be unreliable, and both my generation meter and grid meter had led pulses so these fitted fine. The geo minim isn't designed as a solar generation monitor but works perfect, just the red and green lights it shows are wrong. Red is good for generation, green bad.
Works out a lot cheaper than buying dedicated solar pv monitors.

The Solis inverter I use from the Chinese company Ginlong has an option of a wifi stick ("Ginlong Wifi Monitoring System") which connects to your home wireless and then sends data back to their servers. After registering (free) on their system, you can then log in to their website with email and password, about four or five mouse clicks will take you to a graph of current AC Output Power (and temperature and voltage and other things of less interest). They also keep historical data so you can look at your generation in previous months or whatever. I believe there is a mobile phone app you can use to access the same information.


This wifi stick is optional and seems to cost about £50 to £60 but my installer apparently includes it as standard because a system that never gets monitored is a problem waiting to happen if the end user is all ready to submit their FiT readings for payment, only to then realise something stopped working three months ago.


(If so inclined you can also configure the stick to talk back to a monitoring system of your own choice, instead of their servers, for example OpenHAB or a homebrew Raspberry Pi setup.)