Great investment for homeowners
It has been well known for some time that you can make financial savings by installing solar panels on your home. A contributing factor to this is how much more affordable solar panels have become in recent years.
On top of this, more advanced manufacturing techniques have also led to more compact and efficient panels. With these developments, it isn’t hard to see why more and more households are considering a solar installation.
Save you money on your imported energy bills & reduce your reliance on the National Grid
One of the main advantages of solar energy, why you and many other homeowners may look to invest in solar panels, is to generate energy directly, causing your monthly electricity bills to drop. By using more of your own solar-generated electricity you reduce your overall imported electricity from the National Grid.
You can save more on your electricity bills depending on when you use the most appliances. This is because any electricity which reduces your electricity consumption, rather than being fed into the grid, will make you greater savings.
You can make reductions by using more electrical devices in the daytime when your solar panels will be generating electricity and can directly power them.
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01. Reduce your Carbon Footprint
Solar PV systems allow you to generate your own clean renewable energy at home, and by doing so reduce your carbon footprint.
02. Increase your house value
03. Battery storage systems
Save more with battery storage
Electricity generated that is not being used will automatically be exported to the national grid. Battery storage stores the unused energy that is generated by your solar panels, meaning you can use it whenever you want. This would allow you to use the stored energy, generated during the day, in the evening when you’re watching television or turning on the dishwasher instead of drawing electricity from the grid via your supplier.
Regardless of the measures, you take to maximise self-consumption it is likely that there will be times when you generate more electricity than you need, with the surplus being exported.
The decision to fit battery storage is not purely a financial one. The idea of becoming less dependent on electricity suppliers, whilst at the same time reducing your carbon footprint, can be a significant motivating factor.
There are ways to make the most of the electricity in each of these ways, which we have outlined below. However, we would always recommend you discuss your options with the winning installer.
If you install or have installed a solar PV system but not a battery, the electricity produced can be:
1. Used as it’s being generated
Self-consumption is about using as much of the electricity your panels generate as possible.
There is a range of actions you can take to make sure that as little solar energy as possible ends up being sent to the grid. To maximise self-consumption, you can:
- Set up timers to run devices and appliances during the day
- Get a power diverter to power your immersion heater
- Install an Energy Management System (EMS)
2. Exported to the grid
The Feed-in Tariff (FiT) was the Government scheme through which people or businesses who generated electricity from renewables were paid for the energy they used and exported to the grid. The scheme closed to new applications on 31st March 2019.
A replacement for this is the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG). Suppliers with more than 150,000 domestic customers have to offer at least one SEG tariff. They would also set the price they would pay for each kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity bought. Not all energy suppliers currently provide these, but more are likely to follow.
If you decide not to take battery storage you could still benefit from your excess energy by exporting to the grid and getting paid by energy suppliers through an export tariff.