So my beloved and I just signed up for solar. Spurred into action from Premier Andrews’ rebate – thanks Dan – let me tell you about what we did, our system specifics, and more importantly, how it’s going.
I’m anticipating this will put half of you offside because we have a house that can get solar panels at all, while the other half will be laughing because they got a better deal. Hopefully this may be of interest to a couple of people who are looking at installing solar right now. For the rest of you – sorry (I’m not trying to be a jerk), and nuts (wish I had read your blog before we signed our lives away).
What we did
- Feel guilty about coal-based power
It started with existential musings about climate change, tempered by the fact our house probably has negative insulation. If it’s this cold in winter, it’s probably going to be a sauna in summer…
2. Talk to the smartest person you know
I talked to an environmental engineer who dazzled me with numbers, and basically assured me it was a pretty sure-fire thing. It helped that I knew someone who had already done this.
3. Check out this free info site
Hit up google, but this was the best site I could find. Essentially you make money by using the power you generate yourself, and depending on the cost of your system, it should breakeven in around 3-5 years, meaning that the rest of the system’s lifetime is free money for you.
4. Get some quotes
That site gave me the names of 3 installers who offered to draw up plans for me. Two gave me details over the phone (and the other arranged to come out to my house but was ‘sick’ on a sunny day before a long weekend).
5. Stress over spending the money
The full cost of our system is over $9k, and after rebates we’re out of pocket $5k. My beloved and I had a couple of chats and talked it through.
6. Meet and sign
Beyond a phone call and the company looking at our roof online, before they finalised our quote a couple of installers and the sales guy came out, climbed on our roof and talked us through everything. We signed and transferred 10% that day. The installation should be done within a day, and is scheduled for the end of this month.
Our system
Everyone’s solar system has 3 parts:
- The panels themselves
- An inverter (that takes DC power from the panels and converts it to AC
- Racking and mounting (to affix the panels to your roof)
Our system:
- 12 x LG 335W panels. Total capacity = 4.02 kW
We only stuck panels on our north-facing extension (rather than the east / west original gabled roof), so were physically limited to 12 panels. We considered smaller (and cheaper) 300W Chinese panels, but went with the South Korean ones with a bigger capacity and longer warranty.
2. Solar Edge SE4000H
It’s a premium unit rather than string-inverters that restrict the array to the output of the weakest panel. Future battery compatibility was nice, but I didn’t want a stray leaf to interrupt us.
3. Flat mounting
Our roof is slightly pitched (although not the ideal 30 for Melbourne, or the 9.5 that enables self-cleaning), but I was happy to keep them flat on the roof.
All up the financials for us look like:
$9177 Total system cost
($1952) Federal government rebates
$7225 Purchase Price
($2225) State government rebate
$5000 Out of pocket.
It’s really hard to know how much our system will actually save us because we don’t have summer consumption data (we only moved in during July) and we’ll be using electric AC a lot during summer months. Conservative estimates are a touch over $1000 per year (assuming 60% self-consumption). We were happy with a payback period of 5 years, given the system will last over 20.
Let me… introduce you
Really happy to talk more about our experiences. And if we can introduce you to our solar company just let us know. I’m sure Chris will give you a great deal
🙂
DC
David Carbines 