Using those figures, you'd need around 14 off 2m sq. panels to generate
4396kWh annually - the average UK household use is somewhere anround 4200kWh
annually.
<snip>
We use approximately 13600 units a year of electricity. Average cost
from our electricity company including any service charges and vat at
5% is almost 10p per unit (20 us cents). So our Electric bill is about
£1300 per year ($2600 usd).
I wasn't really considering getting a full pv system as the costs are
too astronomical especially if you go with a UK company and the pay
back time is too long. I was perhaps just thinking of going with a
solar thermal system with just the one large panel for heating water.
Heating water is one of the biggest costs and this system wouldn't get
rid of the £1300 a year electric bill, but it would take a sizeable
dent into it as well as the gas bill. Between the gas and electric
probably about £600 a year is down to heating, maybe even more.
The person I have been speaking with here in the UK who has had a
Solar thermal system put in said that the maximum grant you can get is
up to £400 but that's only if you get the panels from a UK company not
if you buy them and do the install yourself.
Getting the panels from a UK company though you are going to be paying
well over the odds for a solar panel, and the installation is where
the large costs are too.
If you just bought a good panel from a US company that comes with a
long warranty, you could take advantage of the really good exchange
rate for the pound to the dollar. You could then have it shipped over
and you still wouldn't have paid as much for your panel even after
shipping vat and duty than if you had bought it from a UK company.
There are a large number of great companies in the US selling solar
panels. You could install the system yourself and save a lot of money,
and you would be better off financially than if you had gone with a UK
company and even got a full £400 grant.
The bloke I have been speaking with reckons his heating bills have
been cut quite a lot by having the solar heating system he went with.
If you're sensible and keep your costs to a minimum and go the DIY
route here in the UK, a solar set up like this can work, and it could
pay back in a fairly reasonable period of time.
You might think otherwise because everything seems so expensive in the
UK, but the big thing here is that electricity and gas prices are very
high at the moment, the grid is not dirt cheap like in the US.
So if you are prudent and keep costs to a minimum on a solar set up
like this then pay back time could probably be within a decade for a
solar thermal system due to the high energy costs, and even in the UK
with less sunlight than Texas and Timbuktu etc.
As far as the panels are concerned, can anyone tell me what panels you
would recommend? As far as I can remember it was someone in either
the photovoltaic or the homepower newsgroup (this was about a year
ago) who said that the UniSolar panels were good as well as Siemens.
At the time they pointed me in the direction of an article at the TISO
test institute site but I can't seem to find the article now.
What panel's do you recommend? Are Siemens not any good? BP? Which
type of panel would you recommend beside the make? Multi-crystalline?
The UK isn't rain all the time any more we have been having a lot of
great summers of late with lots of sun. Sure it's not an Arizona or
Sydney but it isn't permanently overcast here.
Cheers
John
