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Those of you with solar panels, what's been your experience? (feddit.uk)

submitted 3 days ago by blackn1ght@feddit.uk to c/askuk@feddit.uk

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I'm thinking of getting solar panels and a battery for our house.

What's your setup like, and is there anything you wish you'd set up differently if you were going to install it again? What supplier are you with?

A company extremely local to us is offering 12x Aiko Energy panels (465 watt), with a Sunsynk 5 kW inverter and a 5.32kWh battery. Octopus Energy are offering a similar set up for a similar price, but they're using 450 watt panels, so with using 12 panels I'd be potentially be losing 180 watts vs what the other company is offering. Is that a significant amount or would it basically not really amount to much additional power?

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[–] luisgutz@feddit.uk 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Get a larger battery.

By far the lion share if the savings come from internal usage. Export payments are 20% of so of electricity costs, so you want to be using what you generated.

I have a 5.4kW array, and a 8.8kWh battery. 15% of the battery has to be reserved, so actual capacity is lower.

We basically live off grid for 6-7 months, but winter production is so low (aprox 20% of summer ) that it's hard to even fill up the battery.

But a larger battery would help for those spring and autumn months when some days are good, some are bad.

For reference, comercial installation have a 4:1 ratio of battery capacity to production. In my case that would be 20kWh! Or 5 days of average consumption.

One final thing to say is that our battery system is capped to 3kW. So even when full, if we ask more electricity than that at any point we would be importing.

What this means is that going gas free is harder, as some appliances (hob, kettle) consume a lot.

[–] Krill@feddit.uk 1 points 3 days ago

Time of use tariffs have low import costs than the price Octopus will pay for export, so it's actually better to export solar production than to self consume, so your first advice is inaccurate.