Solar and Battery install - is it worth it?

[Music] welcome to doing our bit and today we're going to look at solar and battery install is it worth it originally i plan to do a separate video on solar and battery and share some of my personal experience as a non-expert really the purpose of sort of sharing some of the things i've learned along the way which i wish i'd known at the start at the time of doing this video the situation now is that solar and battery install together is zero rated but if you add a battery at a later juncture it then attracts 20 percent v80 so to do them separately as i've done wouldn't make sense what you need to make this practical firstly you need to own your own home and plan on staying put have either a south facing or east west facing suitable roof obviously having access to the necessary funds to make this possible have a smart meter in store where you can actually switch to 30 minutes readings which allows you to switch to an off-peak tariff this is absolutely vital for actually charging your battery when there isn't sufficient solar with off-peak energy during the night you should be able to find a tariff which doesn't require you to actually have an ev but you need to be aware of that octopus go currently requires you to actually have an electric vehicle as well so if you only have a battery that that won't be any good for you and finally you need to know what your energy usage actually is so that you can actually plan and look at what size of battery and what size of install makes sense in your particular situation an important question is why do this well firstly it's to and it's i consider an investment in the home as your installnet system with a lifespan of 15 to 30 years when we moved into our very first home in the 70s we added central heating today switching your home over to 100 electric system is i consider the new standard and undoubtedly make sure how more attractive when you do come to sell it secondly as generating a significant proportion of your energy needs yourself makes you more energy independent and therefore more in control of your outgoing costs thirdly if you need a car whether you are considering an electric vehicle or not i guarantee you you will before this decade is out whether that's new or second hand and therefore your electricity needs will increase so being able to generate your own free miles is a great feeling and a further significant cost saving for if everybody who could do this did do this the impact on our co2 emissions and the demand on the group particularly at peak times would significantly benefit everybody and finally you will see many videos showing return on investment projections which which have many variables but as we have seen it's impossible to predict the future and for me this is far more than just a financial transaction but my own best guess here certainly makes economic sense but please realize everybody's numbers will be different now to the things that you really need to know things that might my top tips if you do go for solar panels only you need to be aware that you're likely to use a maximum of 25 to 30 percent of the energy you actually produce because while you would have heard renewables are intermittent what you're probably not so aware of is that your usage is intermittent the current smart energy guarantee usually pays you between four and seven pence per kilowatt for your export so it makes no sense at all to export your excess at 11 am say at four to seven pence while having to import at 28 to 35 pence at 1 pm just because the solar generation at that moment is insufficient for your needs yes batteries are expensive and the technology will and is improving rapidly as they will increase in energy density and remove expensive metals from their construction such as cobalt nickel and even lithium and this is likely to be the case for many years to come so whereas the best time to buy technology is always tomorrow if you have the funds and the existing tech provides the solution you need just go for it make sure that you don't just have a dumb meter for your generation but you have hourly daily monthly stats that are recorded on an app or on the cloud that you can review and look at from your phone tablet pc or laptop our initial install of solar panels was like this that the only way i was able to know my daily generation was literally logging them in excel which is hardly convenient the only way i also knew how much of our own generation i was using was actually comparing this with our export figures again a manual process ignorance is not bliss here and having no idea what is going on will likely not give you the results you hope for most of the negative reviews on solar are due to people just installing panels and then hoping for the best make sure when you when you have the install of your solar panels that you also have installed barriers to stop birds nesting underneath those panels when the scaffolding is up it is much easier to do that than retrofitting it later which at some point i will need to do as i have a pigeon nesting underneath one of our panels as i speak and finally if you wish the battery system to provide power in the case of a power cut this needs to be planned at the beginning so that actually the system is wired that way the reason is systems by default are set up so that when the system recognizes there's no grid available it shuts the whole system down and the reason is very simple because if this wasn't the case when the engineers actually came to sort out the problem they potentially would get electrocuted by your power source so in conclusion if you have the necessary to make this practical it is definitely worth it and part of doing our bit as you become part of the solution rather than part of the problem if you're at my stage of life even more so when you know that your income is unlikely to be increasing over inflation anytime soon and if you've got children and grandchildren a wonderful small investment in their future too i hope you found this video useful and if so please like and subscribe and i look forward to seeing you in the next one

Channel: DoingOurBit

Views: 68,236

Keywords: #solar, #battery, #homebattery, #solarPV

Id: cMzwh7h46xU

Length: 7min 10sec (430 seconds)

Published: Sun May 15 2022