Going Green at Home Starts with Solar Panels

Solar Panels

A decade or so ago Solar panels were THE home improvement to have. You just needed a south facing (ish) roof with limited shade and you could start to reap the benefits of free electricity from solar panel arrays. That income would be topped up by the Government’s Feed In Tariff (FIT) payment. Going green at home starts with solar panels but now includes looking at the whole home. It is not just adding solar panels to your roof.

There are over 1,000,000 homes now fitted with solar panels across Britain. The sight of solar panels adorning south facing roofs becoming common. There is a vast range of choice over what type of solar panel to have, solar envy if your neighbour had black panels and you don’t. The market is changing. Going green at home starts with solar panels and now means so much more. So don’t just join the 1 million homeowners agree that making themselves less reliant on utility energy suppliers. But it is a good starting point.

The solar panel model was simple and effective. The customer saves money. The government pays you to make it economical, and as volume increases with familiarity of the technology becomes mainstream. As the price of electricity keeps going on up then people will offset those increases by investing in solar electricity. A new market is created for solar panels becoming a standard part of every Uk house.

Going Green with Solar Panels PV

A good solar panel array will provide people with around 25% to 30% of their electricity needs. The subsidy payments which brought the payback period down to under ten years. This supplemented the cost of the system. The costs have fallen, a typical solar panel system now costs 75% less than early systems. The subsidy (FIT payments) have fallen until April 2022 this year the FIT payments have ceased altogether.

A solar panel array (groups of solar panels working together as a system) provide scalable electricity supply. Increasing the number of panels increases the amount of electricity generated. For a small one-bed house a system of 1.5kW will provide you with the optimum system size to meet one person’s daily needs. For a typical family of four, a typical system will be a 4kW system. This is usually fitted to a south facing roof. Connected to an inverter (turns DC into AC) which feeds the generated electricity into the house. Supplimenting your external supply of electricity as your primary supply.  Your utility mains electricity supply becomes your secondary system. Which comes into play when your solar panels are not producing enough energy.

Add Smart Battery Storage to Solar Panels

The technology has not stopped developing and nor has the need for it to do so. Electricity costs have kept increasing. Coupled with the advent of new home technologies, more computers and connected (IOT) technologies so homes have become more power hungry. Not to mention our obsession with having everything on standby ready to operate at a click of a switch. All of which adds to our electricity costs.

Add in the outdoor living space. With barbecue, speaker systems and outdoor lighting and home demand for electricity is on the rise. Adding battery storage saves all the Solar Panel PV energy you generate and saves it until you need it. Which is most often in early mornings and early evenings.

Make your Home Green with Solar Panels

Going green at homes starts with solar panels. Then there is the elephant in the room. Your next (or next but one) car will be at least a hybrid, or a fully electric vehicle (EV). that’s going to need to be fully recharged overnight (no you can’t just do it at work and get them to pay).  But it is going to take electricity to make it run. Homes need that electricity to come from renewable sources if we are going to be genuinely reducing our carbon footprint.

That all means that even if we do our bit to reduce our current consumption, (think LED lightbulbs, turning the TV off at the plug and not running the underfloor heating 24/7) then homes will need to use generated electricity far better.

The industry has developed new solutions in home renewable technologies, primarily around getting more out of your solar panels. By adding smart batteries to existing (retrofit) or putting in a solar and storage solution homes can become far less dependent upon their utility provider. This enables home owners to achieve grid neutrality for over half the year.

Solar Panel PV and Battery Storage

Solar and Storage saves your electricity to a battery. Which is monitoring your demand and ensures it saves as much electricity as you need to reduce your external demand for mains electricity. The smart monitoring systems actively manage your storage to maximise your own independent electricity usage.

Most homes do not use that much electricity during the day. Their main usage is at night (retired people use more but even they still use more during the evening) and early next morning. Kettles, cookers, TV’s, lights etc all consume a lot of electricity. So storing your daytime over generation to use during the evening and next morning electricity demand, makes a huge impact on your costs.

Making your HOME Grid Neutral

A solar PV and battery storage system can make you grid neutral for over 8 months a year. That means that outside November, December, January and February you can be fairly sure that you will be grid neutral. Solar and storage solutions therefore take the 25% saving of solar panel systems up to closer to 70% saving for a typical home owner. Coupled with that is that you can still export excess electricity to get a payment (SEG payments). The cost of a solar and storage system is far less than a solar panel array 10 years ago results in a return of investment of around 7 years, which is what people achieved under the old FIT payments.

Learn more about renewable technology from Absolute Solar

When looking at energy savings to be made do look at solar and storage using smart battery technologies. Absolute Solar have partnered up with several Smart energy system providers to offer an extensive range of solar and storage solutions for people looking at installing, or upgrading their home renewable energy. Absolute Solar has been installing solar panels since the early 1990’s. We have been helping homeowners going green at home, starting with solar panels.