As above. Just had this through the door from Sad Khant.
I really need to do some more sums. 'Free' electricity looks so tempting but it isn't actually free is it.....without knowing what it costs, you can't tell.
I already have solar panels, and when I looked at the cost of adding a batt, it was not economically viable. Figures below.
IIRC it was about £6k at the time.
To be of use to me, I would want to store 6kWh, which is enough to run the tumble drier for free on a day that is not sunny, or on a day that was sunny earlier, then cloudy. As it is, laundry days are usually planned to take advantage of sunshine. So I already save in sunny spells, without needing a battery.
my overnight use is about 300w in summer, so if I could store 3kWh then, in summer, I could cut about 3kWh from my daily usage if the preceding day had been reasonably sunny (saving, what? 50p a day for the 6 months of the year? On the days that are fairly sunny ? Around half of them?)
Winter generation is negligible.
You get around 6 sunny months a year.
This march I generated an average of 5.5kWh per day, which is above average. Not much of it was exported because fridge freezers, PC, lights, stuff on standby gives a background load of 300W to 500W for 24 hours a day. Appliances are extra.
Last July I generated an average of 13.4kWh/day and probably exported most of it. I couldn't use it all because it is more than my usage.
If I had used it all, via a battery or otherwise, it would have saved me around £2 a day. How many £2 days are there in £6,000? There are 3,000 sunny summer days. Maybe 20 years?
If I had invested £6,000 (gross) in my managed pension 10 years ago it would be worth £14,100 today.
I don't have a 20 year figure, but it would be more.
A much better investment than buying a battery, even without the tax and NI advantages.
Indeed. A lot of the oldadages/proverbs have got more than a fiar bit of truth in them- so there is very rarely such a thing as a "free lunch/dinner", and most things which sound "too good to be true" usually are!I really need to do some more sums. 'Free' electricity looks so tempting but it isn't actually free is it.....
Returning to context, one of the reasons why the sums about domestic solar generation are so potentially misleading is that (as sort-of implied by JohnD) , even if they are realistic, in terms of amount of sun etc. (which they very often aren't), they look at potential financial benefits over a very long period of time without considering 'cashflow'. Since the capital outlay is considerable, for at least the first few years one will inevitably be financially 'worse off' than would have been without the PV. Only after many years might one start seeing financial benefits but, depending upon one's age and circumstances, one might then not even 'still be around'!
That's really what I meant by "not still around" - not 'still around' the propoerty in question, although maybe still alive, somewhere However, it may also subtract from the sale price. It really all depends upon the buyerOr you might have moved house! Although I suppose you could argue solar panels might add to the sale price.
There will always be massive unknowns, hence 'gambles', given that fuel prices can (and sometimes do) change dramatically almost 'overnight'. One can but do the maths on the basis of one's best attempt to predict what the future will hold.The other factor is that even if you do all the Math, there are so many unknowns - Will the unit price of electricity go up even more massively over the next few years? Will petrol prices go insane meaning that having an electric car being charged by your solar panels makes a lot of sense?
Quite so. Whatever other information/data one uses as the basis for one's calculations and decision-making, one most certainly should not rely on 'claims' made by the manufacturers or sellers/fitters of PV systems....The point is however because a solar panel fitted in 2010 produces X kWh it does not mean the same applies to one fitted in 2022, so all we can go on is the manufacturers claims, what we can however do is look at their claims in the past and see if they were true, and if claims in the past were wrong, we can assume claims today are also wrong.
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