Read more.With fuel costs becoming a genuine concern for many, are solar panels worth installing?
Read more.With fuel costs becoming a genuine concern for many, are solar panels worth installing?
We have, but the roof is leaking so that need to be fixed first
Chadders87 (19-09-2015)
Have them fitted and working well. Peterb has a great topic on them here - http://forums.hexus.net/home-garden-...lar_cells.html
peterb (18-09-2015)
No point when living in Ireland, we only get 3 days of sunshine a year.
If I wasn't in rented property I'd be seriously interested.
Got a 16 panel 4 kilowatt system here. Offsets electric bills nicely for us considering I work from home with fairly high electricity usage. Actually come out with the cost of electric being covered by the returns from the solar and this is on the lesser 14p (iirc) instead of the original 40p+ one. Think we worked out our panels would be 'paid for' in about 8 years but then I'm in North Norfolk and we do get a fair amount of sun.
Would I get it now, depends on the cost of the install because to be fair the return on new installs is even worse than when we got ours. Pretty sure I wouldn't if I was living up north too.
Yes and I do means Tha I can have my pc on all the time and not worry about it
I think that more research needs to go into them to be a better product before I buy them without help from subsidies. The power they produce is close to the tipping point for me for the investment on clean power.
We have them fitted, and they make a lot of difference, both to the amount of energy we consume from the grid and because we get quarterly payments for the energy we produce and for thee energy we send bsck to the grid. Although with the changes the government are implementing they will be a lot less viable option as of January 2016, because the FIT payments will be reduced from 13p per unit produced down to 2p per unit produced.
Payback time is about 20 years - by that time I will be long gone. Also this house will need a new roof within the next 10 years which means taking all that stuff off and reinstalling it for more cost. add to that inefficiency of the current series of panels and who wins on the preset deals?
I think we got a quote saying that it would be only be 5-6.
I did get a quote but it was too expensive and it would take years for me to break even and by that time I would be a grandparent.
I think the government has now stopped the subsidies so it has become not as viable as before.
Actually too much sun can be bad for the panels because they don't work as well when too hot, yes I know it's daft. On extremely hot days in summer, think 35+ degrees C, theres a noticeable drop in performance. The reverse can happen in winter though, you get less power in winter due to weaker sun but on a crisp winters day (ie - degrees C and crystal clear sky etc) you can almost generate per hour the same as a hot day in summer...
Its an ongoing consideration.
Essentially its the "next best thing" scenario in that as the panels develop and get better and more efficient so i keep waiting. Of course if you keep waiting you never get.
The downsides of them are that the feed in tariff will continue to drop and eventually expire and once there are sufficient properties with panels to make a tax profotable/viable then local/national authorities will introduce one, a panel tax based on either square metreage or watts generated.
I have read of the development of roll out panels which one would assume could be used similar to roofing felt. The breakthrough for mass adoption would be if a solar roofing tile was developed at a reasonable price.
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