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We live in detached newish house, gas heating and water, electricity usage probably very average. I know feed-in tariffs are a thing of the past but are solar panels still worthwhile from a financial point of view? Interested in recent experiences, especially if grant funded in any way. We live in Scotland if that makes any difference to funding stuff.
Thanks
Depends on what you can get with the money it would cost to put them on the roof. We spent 8K which was otherwise not really keeping up with inflation is an ISA. Now we get about £1200 pa in feed in tarriffs, not to mention the savings we get by just using the washing machine / dishwasher when its sunny.
You need to know what it will cost you to put it up and how long you will benefit.
I've a few friends working for some of the advice companies around this (energy saving trust, Changeworks - now in Peebmes I believe too) will ask them next time I see them as we're thinking the same ourselves. They have mentioned that about some new grants and possibly something around feed-ins happening soon.
Cheers, I'm in the Borders so will look them up
I think the current cost is about £1k/kwh - so it might cost you about £4k.
It depends what you want out of it really. Financially it "may" be questionable without any incentives but given the current climate debate then I could imagine some form of incentive coming back, although nothing on the scale of the original FITs (I'm with Trimix - we got in on the original tariffs on two house, the panels are probably paid for by now and it now looks very good!)
This is our monthly generation for last year (had an issue with the server in August - that's why it's a low figure) on a 4Kwh east/west installation in Cheshire - you can see for yourself how much power is produced at the time of year when you want it most!!
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But overall I think it's a great thing to have. If I had the money I'd cover our barn which would probably take about 25KWh worth of panels!
Without the feed in tariff (which I think has ended now), I can't see how you'd ever make your money back.
With no FIT any more I’d imagine the only way it would be worthwhile would be to send none of it back into the grid, and have storage so you use all of it for your own home. Guessing this option requires space and is expensive.
Or an EV? Provided it’s at home during the day.
and have storage so you use all of it for your own home
Having seen the cost of battery packs, again I can't imagine a scenario where you'd make your money back before you needed to replace all the HW.
Simplest storage is a large, well insulated hot water tank.
as above, a colleague did all manner of calculations (some years back) and rather than PV panels *and* a solar water panel, he put it all into PV panels that fed into a massive, thrice insulated hot water tank in the house.
Simplest storage is a large, well insulated hot water tank
Yep, the bigger the tank the better.
We have a holiday place in a village with no mains gas so we use electricity for all forms of heating.
Our PV panels feed the hit water tank and when that's maxed out (60c) it switches to feeding a dedicated space heater.
Even throughout the winter there's always a full tank of hot water whenever we go there - which is a big plus.
It's a good use of the generation.