Solar Electricity??

To All of you blokes out there who have solar panels on you house roof:

Do you think they are worth the cost of purchase and installation? How long will it take to recoup those costs?
Is that little bit of "Free Energy" of any real use in the average house hold?.
  If you are storing the power in a battery; Is that bit of power likely to be of any use during a black out or is it only good enough to boil the jug a few times for a cuppa? Could it charge your EV

Apparently EV can be used as a back up emergency power source during blacks outs.
There is a system that can reverse the flow and put it through an inverter, it'll be there some where there in google land.
As to solar panels we do as much electrical stuff as we can during the day to take advantage of the generation.
The air con goes off when da sun does goes down.



cheers  moredeep

Hi Adrian
Is it worth it Yes.Ive upgraded to a 6.6kw system and I'm in credit each year for the last 2 years.The first 3kw system paid for itself in 3-4 years.This one looks like doing the same.The best thing is being able to run the air con throughout summer off the solar.

So does that mean that you sell the power that your solar produces  back to your main grid energy supplier who then reduce your usage bill accordingly?
We have direct solar heating hot water (not photo electric panels) which reduces our summer time average quarterly  elec bill by around 80.00 dollars but not so much during the winter when the savings are very negligible to non existent.
It has taken approx 7 years to pay for itself, although when you add in reg maintenance costs plus a couple of repairs we are probably still in the red..
The actual heating panels are still fine and have survived some very nasty hail stones that dented the tank but did not break the panels.

We put in a 3 kW system back in 2011. Only recently have we needed to pay any electricity and it even paid for most of our gas bills as well. Now that the price of electricity has increased dramatically but the feed in tariff has remained the same we are finding that we need to pay. Our recent electricity bill has us paying about $50.00 and we have nothing in credit at the end of summer, the first time ever. The cooler weather conditions have contributed to the lower power generation from the panels.

As for a battery, I doubt it is worth the money at the moment. In excess of $10,000.00 and they only have a life of about 10 years. If I was going to install a battery it would be to go "off grid" but I don't think you can legally do that in the city.

Regards Axtyr.

This summer has been fairly tame in Canberra. and as a result we have had to use the hot water electricity booster almost every day since January and the solar assist for about 7 days, so the savings this year to date has been low..
It is interesting that we have not watered a lawn since Jan 2012 (cost of water supply and usage is increasing) and the lawns are usually brown but this summer our laws are green and the surrounding bush is very healthy ....Maybe it is the effect of the large Ozone hole over Australia at the moment...All that extra ultraviolet radiation is making the plants very happy.

Axtyr wrote:We put in a 3 kW system back in 2011. Only recently have we needed to pay any electricity and it even paid for most of our gas bills as well. Now that the price of electricity has increased dramatically but the feed in tariff has remained the same we are finding that we need to pay. Our recent electricity bill has us paying about $50.00 and we have nothing in credit at the end of summer, the first time ever. The cooler weather conditions have contributed to the lower power generation from the panels.

As for a battery, I doubt it is worth the money at the moment. In excess of $10,000.00 and they only have a life of about 10 years. If I was going to install a battery it would be to go "off grid" but I don't think you can legally do that in the city.

Regards Axtyr.

Nobody can stop you from going off the grid, that is your choice. Obviously you would not do that until you had an alternative energy supply.

If you did go off the grid then you would need an electricity supply (if  you wanted to go electric) that could deliver around 20KWh max per day and approx 17kwh/day for a couple with children. An average monthly energy consumption can vary between 700 and 2000 kwh. depending on the size of the property and house hold.

Forget batteries they are too expensive and will not last very long plus of course you will need a means of recharging them.

The advantage of solar alone is that you will get very small main grid electricity bill but connect a battery system to it and you will be shelling out qt least 10,000 for the battery that will be dead in around 5 to 10 years.

When you buy batteries for your metal detector or mbl ph you donot pay for the electricity that you get from them but with a battery system hooked to the grid you will be paying for the power generated (free from the sun during recharge) when it is connected to the grid....Sounds like a big con to me.

Anyway you can easily connect a battery storage to a current solar power system in the future if the price of the batteries ever comes down to an affordable level......But by that time the Greens will have stopped all mining for the materials necessary for the manufacture of the lithium iron batteries and the wind farm power generators super magnets will be all crystalizing and fracturing.

adrian ss wrote:So does that mean that you sell the power that your solar produces  back to your main grid energy supplier who then reduce your usage bill accordingly?
We have direct solar heating hot water (not photo electric panels) which reduces our summer time average quarterly  elec bill by around 80.00 dollars but not so much during the winter when the savings are very negligible to non existent.
It has taken approx 7 years to pay for itself, although when you add in reg maintenance costs plus a couple of repairs we are  probably still in the red..
The actual heating panels are still fine and have survived some very nasty hail stones that dented the tank but did not break the panels.

Yep The feed in amount they pay varies for the time of day and appears as a credit(minus) on the bill.Overall the 3Kw system meant paying a small bill but with the 6.6Kw I get money back.The bill amount is a minus each time.
Here in Vic we have free heat pump hot water systems to replace the electric element off peak ones.On mine it has a LCD setup display and I set it to heat during the day from the solar so mainly free.

Some interesting electricity usage figures.
Seems that Tas and the ACT are the most hungry elec usage States.

https://www.momentumenergy.com.au/blog/average-electricity-bill

It's strange for Tassie having higher bills given that they produce cheap hydro.
I recall that Launceston banned all wood fire appliances due to poor air qualities back in the ??early to mid 80's.
Everyone had to go electric. I remember going through there and seeing the thick layer of smoke over it and thinking this can't be good
As to why the ACT has high bills is a mystery, maybe they think everyone living there is super wealthy



cheers moredeep

The Canberra Gov workers are well off here but the average worker bee is close to becoming homeless. There also seems to be a push to get all Canberrans out of their homes and into hugely expensive blocks of dinky toy sized flats. These units are dirt cheap with their polystyrene (that burns really really well) walls to build but expensive to purchase. A gigantic Tradie rip off.
The ACT has a population of 431,215 and a land area of 2,358 sq km. almost all of the ACT population is in the toy city of Canberra.
Tas has a population of 541,071 and a land area of 68,401 sq km and it is a hilly country and the population is well spread out around the coastline.so maybe costs more to run the power across the hills n stuff.

Google must be reading our forum,I've had adds for free hot water systems since my last post.Big brother is watching us no more privacy.

I keep getting adds for telescopes, cameras, n XRF analyzers... and just lately, Tesla Coils

LOL