At RenewSolar we want to give you confidence in value, now some solar companies want a lot of money as they are capitalists and therefore want to profit from you, but RenewSolar are nothing like that, we are not for profit!
Lets not get off on the wrong foot, you want to save thousands on solar, but there is value considerations.
Solar is not free.
Solar panels, inverters and batteries are not free nor do they provide you with free energy, You wont even really save money, but what you will do is establish a value point, Is Solar valuable? yes. Will solar save you money? yes.
Solar appears to offer free electricity and this is only true when its paid for, this we call the ROI, thats return on investment if you did not know this already. So if you pay £2000 on a solar installation, its not free until its earned £2001.
Buy using ROI.
Lets look at the ROI for solar products as they currently stand.
450w Bifacial solar panel – ROI 126 days
I have given this solar panel 126 days to make enough power to pay for itself. The math used here would be from late March using 4 sun hours and a kWh price of £0.26. As the year moves on the sun hours increase to about a maximum of 8 hours, so the actual ROI time is lower than I have stated.
We also count a solar year as only 275 days, the remainder is low to no real power. but they still work.
It makes no difference to how many solar panels you add; The ROI will remain the same period as they will produce power equal to the cost of grid power. The panels have a life of around 25 years, but we tend to use a 10 year calculation.
Commonly solar panels will be orders in 2,4,6,8,10 and 12 panels. We often see started with 4 or 8 panels.
A 8 pack of solar panels produce 3.3kw of power, this falls within self installation G98 certificates and therefore the home would have a 3.6kw inverter.
This type of math is flawed for most, as the solar input does NOT have to match the output. More often, peoples homes use around 220W, therefore everything above is not used when you have a small load.
With 3.6kw of solar you will make around 14.4kwh of power each day. Therefore for most homes you would have an excess of power which would need to be stored in a battery otherwise you lose value from your solar installation.
15kwh Battery storage. ROI 423 days
Solar storage batteries can be the single biggest cost of solar. If your lucky to find us, you would know that we are leading the cost reduction in battery storage, so I think you would be paying half the price over other retailers.
( let us know in the comments)
Solar batteries work very different when it comes to value. The value of a battery will depend on how you use it and what charges the power. You may be paying £0.04p to charge the battery per kWh, therefore you could save that power to use all day even when prices are over £0.26p kWh. meaning that you save £0.22 per kwh even without solar.
Without solar, you could save around £3.30 per day, That gives you an ROI of 500 days
Trying to find good prices to charge the battery is becoming more difficult, so keep that in mind, you may find that your paying more that 4p a kWh at cheap rate.
Buying an inverter is a little more complex, There are a few types of inverter, off grid, hybrid, attached, and grid tied. Each of them work differently but the costs can be vastly different.
Off grid is the lowest, but can be a little complex to install, you have to think of redundancy too.
A grid tied is without a battery, so you can only use what you produce and during that production time only.
A hybrid works like a grid tied, but has a battery, these are usually the most expensive but offer variations of flexibility.
Attached is more like a UPS as they can pass through power, charge from the grid, but do not provide power back to the grid, there can run in different modes too, so they can be like off grid.
Our Sunsynk 3.6kw hybrid inverter is very popular due to its low price and great features. The victron multiplus II is also popular, but you have to buy more add-ons to make a working solar installation, so they work out about the same.
The inverter doesn’t make any power, these come from the battery and solar panels. So doing the ROI on these can be a little tricky as a stand alone. so We have to shift to a “solar set up”.
We will go for 8 panels, the 3.6kw inverter and a 15kwh battery That totals £2,995.00
( this is not a full kit, there are a few bits missing)
Lets ROI this little kit, we know the cost and we can convert this to kWh, that’s 11,519kWh of grid power at £0.26
Looking at the solar production 14.4kwh the ROI is 799 days.
Looking at the battery production 767 days.
So ROI will be around 783 days, Remember that we only use 275 days, which gives you a total ROI of 2.85 years.
Unfortunately Solar does not install itself, and there were bits missing, like the mounting system, which comes to around £350, scaffold hire, wiring, notice and legal stuff as well as the installation itself would top this up to around 4 years ROI.
Comment below if you can work out that Profit/Saving after 10 years.
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