We got solar panels! I’m so chuffed. Honestly, I’ve been looking at solar panels for nearly 19 years.
We were all a bit surprised to discover that Grandad had actually left us money. He was not a wealthy man by any stretch of the imagination, but he bought the council house they’d been living in for 30+ years sometime in the 80s when Maggie started selling them off, and lived in it for another 40 years afterwards. It needed some work, but property in the South of England is not cheap no matter how much needs doing.
In a funny way, I suppose I could say I have Margaret Thatcher to thank for my solar panels. Not something I ever expected to say!
Anyway, it’s not a great time to be keeping money in the bank right now. Interest rates suck. So having started eyeing up solar panels back when I lived in Haddenham, I revisited the idea. They’ve finally levelled out in price, it seems. I ran the idea past Clarkie, and she was absolutely fine with the concept of producing lovely green electricity and not having to worry about electricity prices increasing.
After that, it all seemed to happen very quickly! We found a local dealer – SolarKW – who talked us through everything. We have a roof that faces sort of ENE – WSW, so we’ve split our installation evenly across the two sides of the roof. We’ve got 6 each side, which should be plenty to cover our electricity costs – we still import a bit, but if we can get an export tariff we should be covered.
We haven’t gone for a battery. Whilst solar panels have come down in price and matured, batteries don’t seem to have. I’m counting on electric cars pushing the development of batteries over the next few years, plus there are still issues around recycling them, and they don’t last as long as the panels either. We can always retrofit, if it seems to make sense.
We did go for SolarEdge inverters though. Apparently they help to increase the efficiency of the panels. What they definitely do is come with the MySolarEdge app, with all the data for my geeking needs. Oh. Hell. Yes. Graphs for days!
I think Clarkie might be thinking that electricity didn’t cost so much after all…
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