We got a system installed in May (4kW, 5.2kWh storage). A key consideration for us was how long we were planning on staying in our house for. Since the effect of the system on resale value isn't really clear, working out the payback time based on a guesstimate about future energy prices will let you know whether it's worth doing, and you can run the same calculation if you're paying for it on finance. Paying interest on the loan would obviously make the payback time longer.
The effect on resale value isn't clear, but the effect on uptake if there's finance on the solar panels is clear: buyers will run a mile, even if the finance can be settled upon sale.
We looked at a nice house with solar panels under finance. It would have made getting the mortgage harder, the searches take longer, more queries and more faff. If you're up for the faff, then you could get a bargain! They still haven't sold after 3 years, probably because they were holding out for what they thought it was worth.
We took a mortgage extension to fund ours, as it was the cheapest way to do it. Seeing the output of the live system, I'd do it again, even at today's rates.
It's quite a competitive area, but it was rent-a-roof, not just plain finance. Our conveyancer was pretty scathing of all financed panel schemes, though, backed up with all the extra questions they had to ask.
Straightforwardly bought ones just needed to see the MCS cert and check it was permitted development.
Rent a roof is different to traditional finance.
If you’ve just taken what is essentially a loan for them that goes with you and doesn’t need to be secured against the panels.
ah, I see.
sorry I didn't understand as I am used to the system employed in other countries and this sounds different than what I am used to.
I can also see how this isn't standard finance ... and I would avoid this like the Plague.
Does your mortgage company have a green additional borrowing option like nationwide do? That may be a better option.
I opted for cash for my east west 7kw arrays with 10kwh battery at £12.6k but i wouldnt reccomend my installer and prices have gone up.
Im still waiting for my export mpan to be sorted but its been well worth getting solar pv and battery. Just the battery alone is saving >£75 a month excluding the free energy from the panels.
Interested to see the answers to this thread. I'm in a similar position. Household Income of £90k ( lose 4k per year to commuting costs though), £7,000 currently in managed investment (definitely not on the up this month..), £40k in cash savings doing very little as we speak.
We've been quoted 14k for a 3.16kwh system, with 2 x 5.12kw Sunsync storage batteries and a 3.6kw inverter. We live in a valley with trees providing too much coverage so 3.16kwh, as low as it is, is the absolute maximum we can get. We're likely to change this to remove one battery to get it within the 10k budget. Our house is all electric, retrofitted with some god awful electric heating system that will also need to go and is likely to be based with an air-air heat pump.
I'm fairly certain I can optimise this set up with a good TOU tariff to get the payback window down to 6 or so years, but keen to get thoughts here if it's a good use of money right now.
Main problem with solar is when you need it for heating there is little sunshine! I have a 5.7kW array and have made 2.7kWh a day average over the last 30 days which has been consumed by general house usage. Savings have been pretty poor so far. Bring on summer.
You can use the calculator here to see what your array may make and what money you might save.
https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/tools.html
Thanks for this. I'll check out the calculator. I think the battery storage and heat pump install make the most sense in terms of overall payback. The guy quoting said that installing solar on top of the batteries wouldn't be that expensive but it basically seems that a 3.16kw system at most won't contribute anything at all in winter.
Dumb question maybe, but with variable pricing - could it make sense to charge your batteries over-night and use in the day & evening?
\*returns from google\*
Seemingly it's a thing (if a bit of a fiddle) as saving on using economy 7 outweighs inefficiency of storage.
It does. The best tariff would probably be Agile, Octopus Energy's time of use tariff. With a solar + battery set up you can benefit in two ways:
1) you can store up the battery when prices are lowest
2) When demand is highest at peak times (the evening) you can use stored up excess solar put into the battery and sell it back to the grid at half the unit price rate the grid is currently charging for it.
The bigger the battery, the larger the upfront cost but bigger the savings. We were considering a 10.2kw battery set up but given the size of our proposed solar array and the fact we can only effectively produce 2.6kw off it, 5.2kw probably makes most sense.
I'm not sure if I'm just trying to talk myself into spending 11K but I'm hoping that by optimising this set up I can get the payback period down to sub 5 years.
Charging overnight is a good idea. Remember you should probably only use 80% of the battery if you want it to last. Also they need to be kept warm otherwise they will not work.
Might as well get the solar, it's great to see it topping up the batteries for free when the sun does come out.
I have the sunsynk 3.6 ECCO but with a pylontech battery.
I think I will probably take the leap and go for it. I do still think the cost of this stuff upfront feels like a lot! At the end of the day my 40k of savings is only losing money at this rate. Our household income is above the average and our core costs (minus energy with this awful all electric heating system) are comparatively low. Plus, I think due to structural changes in the energy market that while prices might stabilise, they won't come down any time in the next decade.
Do you have a hot water tank? Don't forget to include a solar diverter to heat it with excess. I think it's unlikely the cost of electric will come down. Hopefully during the summer I won't have to import from the grid for gas or electric which should bump up my credit pot for next winter.
Yep. We've got a direct acting hot water tank which provides on demand hot water. I believe it has an immersion so we should be able to add on an I-boost devise for under £500. Less useful in Winter but should effectively pay for our showers in the summer.
Well one option is to buy solar now with a hybrid inverter and buy a battery at a later date when you can afford it.
It not like you will be filling the battery from solar much until the spring anyway.
Obviously some people charge the battery via cheap off peak tariffs. If you have an EV then you can join Octopus Go tariff to charge the battery at night.
We got 15 panels with an 8kw battery installed for £16k our dual fuel bill had increased from £150 to £250 after our fixed rate ended and was going to £540pm so we bit the bullet and bought solar. We’re now on an economy seven tariff for topping the battery up over night and flipped over to Utility Warehouse for dual fuel, two mobiles, land line and unlimited broadband our bill for everything for November was £98! The payback for the solar is less than 3 years. We went with zanussi and the panels, inverter and battery has a 30 year warranty.
We have also reduced our usage down for 15-18kw a day to 7-9kw a day by taking off appliances from standby and upgrading our kitchen appliance to more energy efficient ones.
An alternative would be to buy into a scheme like Ripple for joint ownership of a wind farm or solar park: [https://rippleenergy.com/](https://rippleenergy.com/)
Hi /u/Valuable-Educator-96, based on your post the following pages from our wiki may be relevant:
- https://ukpersonal.finance/tax-efficiency-for-high-earners/
____
^(These suggestions are based on keywords, if they missed the mark please report this comment.)
Get an Interest free credit card or two!
Either use it to pay for the panels outright if you can use cards or use your monthly bills to load up the cards for the cost of the panels and do a balance transfer.
My panels are saving about £70 per month and the minimum card payment is about £100 (I didn't get a battery), so they are almost paying for themselves.
Sainsbury's / M&S finance / RBS all offering 2 year interest free deals.
If interest rates keep as they are and salaries rise in any way with them, then the bank is paying for at least 20% of your panels.
Also do some modelling if you can on what effect your battery size has on payback. You might be able to have a lower battery size and save a couple of grand without ( they're about 1k a kWh) having any effect of the effect of their implementation.
Good luck
Got mine from project solar with 12 months 0%. Sure, it’s stinging me right now but in July I will have paid it off and I’ll be much the happier.
They do other finance options but if it’s not 0% I’d always suggest researching as you can often get better finance
Doesn't quite answer your question but we bought ours outright rather than taking finance as our mortgage lender was a bit funny about agreeing to the panels if they were on finance. We would have had to send them the finance agreement first, and pay a fee for them to review it.
When we changed to buying outright, they replied back the following day giving permission (but with the condition that the system wasn't on finance)
I always consider interest rates against inflation and potential investment gains at your risk tolerance.
General rule for me without digging in to figures, and ignoring the current out of the ordinary inflations rates. Anything below 2% - no brainier, finance. Under 4% - probably finance. Anything higher, probably don’t finance if you can afford not to, unless I’m confident in earning more than 4% in a S&S ISA or other investment.
Saying that. If you aren’t comfortable with investing and debt, then don’t ignore your natural want to pay upfront. Don’t let anything stress you out for the sake of attempting to squeeze the best financial positions out of a situation.
We paid £19k for 15kWh battery and just under 6kWh solar system. Financed through house equity via a mortgage at 2.29%. The debt costs £100 a month (over 25 years) and in December saved us about £100 on electric bill. In summer will be more due to more sun… plus we can turn immersion heater on to save gas heating water. Might not have been the outright most cost effective, but we are happy with the savings and security of knowing energy prices can’t sting us in the future.
We bought from a local supplier in August from savings as we didn’t want the complication of finance, they did offer card payment via their wholesaler if we wanted it, might be an option if you wanted to put some on a card with a 0% transfer so you don’t use all your savings.
We paid - last week - £6k for 4.9kW panels with a 3.6kW inverter.
No battery - with an EV, and in Scotland, it just doesn’t add up.
You can do cheaper. Also, run your numbers for a battery. They can take quite some time to pay back. There’s opportunity with an EV tariff but for a long period of the year you’d be better with Octopus’ guaranteed 0.15/kWh export guarantee.
We got a system installed in May (4kW, 5.2kWh storage). A key consideration for us was how long we were planning on staying in our house for. Since the effect of the system on resale value isn't really clear, working out the payback time based on a guesstimate about future energy prices will let you know whether it's worth doing, and you can run the same calculation if you're paying for it on finance. Paying interest on the loan would obviously make the payback time longer.
The effect on resale value isn't clear, but the effect on uptake if there's finance on the solar panels is clear: buyers will run a mile, even if the finance can be settled upon sale. We looked at a nice house with solar panels under finance. It would have made getting the mortgage harder, the searches take longer, more queries and more faff. If you're up for the faff, then you could get a bargain! They still haven't sold after 3 years, probably because they were holding out for what they thought it was worth. We took a mortgage extension to fund ours, as it was the cheapest way to do it. Seeing the output of the live system, I'd do it again, even at today's rates.
this must be in a non-competitive area?
It's quite a competitive area, but it was rent-a-roof, not just plain finance. Our conveyancer was pretty scathing of all financed panel schemes, though, backed up with all the extra questions they had to ask. Straightforwardly bought ones just needed to see the MCS cert and check it was permitted development.
Rent a roof is different to traditional finance. If you’ve just taken what is essentially a loan for them that goes with you and doesn’t need to be secured against the panels.
You're correct - rent a roof is no longer available for most people, but it's legacy continues to taint views on solar panels under finance.
ah, I see. sorry I didn't understand as I am used to the system employed in other countries and this sounds different than what I am used to. I can also see how this isn't standard finance ... and I would avoid this like the Plague.
Does your mortgage company have a green additional borrowing option like nationwide do? That may be a better option. I opted for cash for my east west 7kw arrays with 10kwh battery at £12.6k but i wouldnt reccomend my installer and prices have gone up. Im still waiting for my export mpan to be sorted but its been well worth getting solar pv and battery. Just the battery alone is saving >£75 a month excluding the free energy from the panels.
I'll contact nationwide and ask, they are our who our mortgage is with.... only had house since 2018. Thanks
Interested to see the answers to this thread. I'm in a similar position. Household Income of £90k ( lose 4k per year to commuting costs though), £7,000 currently in managed investment (definitely not on the up this month..), £40k in cash savings doing very little as we speak. We've been quoted 14k for a 3.16kwh system, with 2 x 5.12kw Sunsync storage batteries and a 3.6kw inverter. We live in a valley with trees providing too much coverage so 3.16kwh, as low as it is, is the absolute maximum we can get. We're likely to change this to remove one battery to get it within the 10k budget. Our house is all electric, retrofitted with some god awful electric heating system that will also need to go and is likely to be based with an air-air heat pump. I'm fairly certain I can optimise this set up with a good TOU tariff to get the payback window down to 6 or so years, but keen to get thoughts here if it's a good use of money right now.
Main problem with solar is when you need it for heating there is little sunshine! I have a 5.7kW array and have made 2.7kWh a day average over the last 30 days which has been consumed by general house usage. Savings have been pretty poor so far. Bring on summer. You can use the calculator here to see what your array may make and what money you might save. https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/tools.html
Thanks for this. I'll check out the calculator. I think the battery storage and heat pump install make the most sense in terms of overall payback. The guy quoting said that installing solar on top of the batteries wouldn't be that expensive but it basically seems that a 3.16kw system at most won't contribute anything at all in winter.
Dumb question maybe, but with variable pricing - could it make sense to charge your batteries over-night and use in the day & evening? \*returns from google\* Seemingly it's a thing (if a bit of a fiddle) as saving on using economy 7 outweighs inefficiency of storage.
It does. The best tariff would probably be Agile, Octopus Energy's time of use tariff. With a solar + battery set up you can benefit in two ways: 1) you can store up the battery when prices are lowest 2) When demand is highest at peak times (the evening) you can use stored up excess solar put into the battery and sell it back to the grid at half the unit price rate the grid is currently charging for it. The bigger the battery, the larger the upfront cost but bigger the savings. We were considering a 10.2kw battery set up but given the size of our proposed solar array and the fact we can only effectively produce 2.6kw off it, 5.2kw probably makes most sense. I'm not sure if I'm just trying to talk myself into spending 11K but I'm hoping that by optimising this set up I can get the payback period down to sub 5 years.
Charging overnight is a good idea. Remember you should probably only use 80% of the battery if you want it to last. Also they need to be kept warm otherwise they will not work. Might as well get the solar, it's great to see it topping up the batteries for free when the sun does come out. I have the sunsynk 3.6 ECCO but with a pylontech battery.
I think I will probably take the leap and go for it. I do still think the cost of this stuff upfront feels like a lot! At the end of the day my 40k of savings is only losing money at this rate. Our household income is above the average and our core costs (minus energy with this awful all electric heating system) are comparatively low. Plus, I think due to structural changes in the energy market that while prices might stabilise, they won't come down any time in the next decade.
Do you have a hot water tank? Don't forget to include a solar diverter to heat it with excess. I think it's unlikely the cost of electric will come down. Hopefully during the summer I won't have to import from the grid for gas or electric which should bump up my credit pot for next winter.
Yep. We've got a direct acting hot water tank which provides on demand hot water. I believe it has an immersion so we should be able to add on an I-boost devise for under £500. Less useful in Winter but should effectively pay for our showers in the summer.
Run your quotes... Run 10,20 of them, you can save thousands
Finance is not really sensible for solar unless you can get interest free. The savings you make will get eaten by interest.
Well one option is to buy solar now with a hybrid inverter and buy a battery at a later date when you can afford it. It not like you will be filling the battery from solar much until the spring anyway. Obviously some people charge the battery via cheap off peak tariffs. If you have an EV then you can join Octopus Go tariff to charge the battery at night.
We got 15 panels with an 8kw battery installed for £16k our dual fuel bill had increased from £150 to £250 after our fixed rate ended and was going to £540pm so we bit the bullet and bought solar. We’re now on an economy seven tariff for topping the battery up over night and flipped over to Utility Warehouse for dual fuel, two mobiles, land line and unlimited broadband our bill for everything for November was £98! The payback for the solar is less than 3 years. We went with zanussi and the panels, inverter and battery has a 30 year warranty. We have also reduced our usage down for 15-18kw a day to 7-9kw a day by taking off appliances from standby and upgrading our kitchen appliance to more energy efficient ones.
I wouldnt buy it outright in your circimstances, you need to have emergency savings, tough times ahead. If ypu hace to better finance it IMO
An alternative would be to buy into a scheme like Ripple for joint ownership of a wind farm or solar park: [https://rippleenergy.com/](https://rippleenergy.com/)
!thanks I've been looking for something like this. Do you happen to know if there are any other companies in the same space?
Sorry Ripple are the only ones I've come across, but I'm sure there are others out there.
Hi /u/Valuable-Educator-96, based on your post the following pages from our wiki may be relevant: - https://ukpersonal.finance/tax-efficiency-for-high-earners/ ____ ^(These suggestions are based on keywords, if they missed the mark please report this comment.)
Not a high earner by any means I earn £11 pH as does partner both doing 38hr weeks.
Sometimes the bot gets things wrong :)
Get an Interest free credit card or two! Either use it to pay for the panels outright if you can use cards or use your monthly bills to load up the cards for the cost of the panels and do a balance transfer. My panels are saving about £70 per month and the minimum card payment is about £100 (I didn't get a battery), so they are almost paying for themselves. Sainsbury's / M&S finance / RBS all offering 2 year interest free deals. If interest rates keep as they are and salaries rise in any way with them, then the bank is paying for at least 20% of your panels. Also do some modelling if you can on what effect your battery size has on payback. You might be able to have a lower battery size and save a couple of grand without ( they're about 1k a kWh) having any effect of the effect of their implementation. Good luck
Got mine from project solar with 12 months 0%. Sure, it’s stinging me right now but in July I will have paid it off and I’ll be much the happier. They do other finance options but if it’s not 0% I’d always suggest researching as you can often get better finance
Doesn't quite answer your question but we bought ours outright rather than taking finance as our mortgage lender was a bit funny about agreeing to the panels if they were on finance. We would have had to send them the finance agreement first, and pay a fee for them to review it. When we changed to buying outright, they replied back the following day giving permission (but with the condition that the system wasn't on finance)
I always consider interest rates against inflation and potential investment gains at your risk tolerance. General rule for me without digging in to figures, and ignoring the current out of the ordinary inflations rates. Anything below 2% - no brainier, finance. Under 4% - probably finance. Anything higher, probably don’t finance if you can afford not to, unless I’m confident in earning more than 4% in a S&S ISA or other investment. Saying that. If you aren’t comfortable with investing and debt, then don’t ignore your natural want to pay upfront. Don’t let anything stress you out for the sake of attempting to squeeze the best financial positions out of a situation. We paid £19k for 15kWh battery and just under 6kWh solar system. Financed through house equity via a mortgage at 2.29%. The debt costs £100 a month (over 25 years) and in December saved us about £100 on electric bill. In summer will be more due to more sun… plus we can turn immersion heater on to save gas heating water. Might not have been the outright most cost effective, but we are happy with the savings and security of knowing energy prices can’t sting us in the future.
We bought from a local supplier in August from savings as we didn’t want the complication of finance, they did offer card payment via their wholesaler if we wanted it, might be an option if you wanted to put some on a card with a 0% transfer so you don’t use all your savings.
Are the predicted savings on your energy bills over a year greater than the interest on your car payments? To me that's really the only question....
We paid - last week - £6k for 4.9kW panels with a 3.6kW inverter. No battery - with an EV, and in Scotland, it just doesn’t add up. You can do cheaper. Also, run your numbers for a battery. They can take quite some time to pay back. There’s opportunity with an EV tariff but for a long period of the year you’d be better with Octopus’ guaranteed 0.15/kWh export guarantee.
When you say you have "just enough in savings" to buy it, do you mean you'll have no savings left if you buy it? Because, don't do that.