The cost of living payments for 2024 have been made and over the year from 2023 the government paid £1200. while viral videos shows tattoos and eyebrow dying being paid for; could you have saved money for over ten years with solar? and would the investment been better than banking?
The cost of living payments have been made quarterly by the government for the past two years under the “cost of living crisis” but if you had the payment and put it into solar what sort of system could you have and what returns and savings could you have had. Were going to look at this right now…
Solar has become more and more affordable as china goes in to deflations while the rest of us have inflation. the unsteady market and issues with covid shut downs last years saw many problems with the supply chains. A more recent flood to the market has lowered the prices on some hardware to shocking levels.
Lets look at a small Grid tied solar system:
Growatt (and others) makes small inverters, the price is around £176-235
Panels are sub £90 but there are some catches with shipping being £150 we will use our shop and the 505W solar panel at £115 you will want about 3 panels… so that £345
Wiring “stuff” will cost you around £130.
this brings the “total” to £710, so you can have it installed for about £490.. but we have missed out the mounting system. we will say that was £75 as its on the ground.
£710 will be our figure and what I will do is start by changing this to kWh at 29 pence. This will give us a common ground to work from, that’s 2488kwh of electric for the cost of solar, oddly that’s not fare under my homes annual use.
In a year you would need to “make” 6.7kWh each day to get your money back.
( wont happen in the UK for sure, and I wrote “make” as there is a Big thing about grid tied solar inverters ill mention later.)
Our 1.5kw array of just 3 panels would cover around 3×3 meters of space for those wondering, but I want to look at the math we use for our client installations.
1.5kw of solar panels would provide this as a peak power.
using sun hours on Sun days.
We average 275 sun days a year. some say its more.. around 90 days is poor.
Using standard industry installation maths, the power would be 6.06kWh per day. (4 sun hours)
For those of you who jumped the gun and said, “well that just over a year” you would be wrong.
For those of you who said; “but summer sun hours are 8, so you would get more” you would also be wrong. but less wrong. The problem with grid tied solar is that you only benefit from the solar that you use and not what you can make.
The reason for this is that a grid tied inverter does not store power, it makes it, and if you are not using it, it goes back to the grid.
Grid-tied solar systems are directly connected to the utility grid. They allow excess energy to be fed back into the grid, which is great for maximising savings and reducing reliance on fossil fuels. However, the downside is that grid-tied systems cannot operate independently. When sunlight is limited (such as during cloudy days or at night), you will rely on power from the grid. if the grids out, you are still out of power too. Without battery storage, grid-tied systems are vulnerable during grid failures. If the grid goes down, your solar panels won’t provide any power to your home.
For that reason , if you have a grid tied, a hybrid would be ideal as they have a battery and some have emergency power, so when the grid goes down you still have your lights on.. but they do cost more!
Investing in solar and you
With anything, Solar is an investment and the hardware will last more than 10 years. So which is better, the bank or solar?
If you can get 5% which seems obtainable from the bank, in the first year you could make a wholesome £35.50 After 10 years, your investment would be approximately £1,154.68.
if we average, that we make 6kw a day and use it all. you would save £1.74 a day. If the cost of energy kept the same, over ten years that would be £5,641.00
The profit of solar would be £4,486.32 an I think its close to say your investment into solar would be ten fold.
Note that this is NOT the case will all installations.
Conclusions:
if you have had the pay out from the government then hopefully you invested it rather than spent it, even if you paid your energy bill, with the money, you will find that when that money stops you are back to paying the high costs of your annual bills. if you invested in solar your going to be saving on your bills for ten years making that cost of living pay out worth over £4,500.
Grid tied works on small scale, without energy storage and solar batteries they are not going to be the best option, but for a price point and fair return, of all the solar kits, it kind of makes sense.
Would you do it?
We did a small scale, as we don’t “sell” what we haven’t tried.
We made a small system with “confined” remits, the panels are not best placed, and much smaller. Our return of net zero will be in around April this year. (That’s about 17 months)
What were some of the issues?
For me the big thing was that from Feb to October we really did save during the day, the meter showed zero and we were exporting. The down side was the inverter could have been more powerful to take the loads that were higher power than it is. I estimated that we exported around 64% of the power we were making. This could have been put in a battery to be used later, but you cant with a grid tied non hybrid system.
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