Very few solar panels on new houses

[Jim K..]

Ah T i m ' s pious-truth-trip once again ;-)

[Commander Kinsey]

I noticed some new houses being built, all with environmental shit, like solar panels, water reclamation from gutters etc. But why do they have only 3 or 4 panels when the roof could hold about 12?

[Andy Burns]

Very little incentive to have any at all now that the feed-in/bribery tariff has ended.

[Commander Kinsey]

That's what I would have thought, but these houses are only a couple of years old. None I could understand, loads I could understand, but not a few on each roof.

[Andy Burns]

FIT ended (for new installs) 31st March 2019.

[Commander Kinsey]

I wasn't aware it was a different date for new installs. I tried to get some on my existing house 5 years ago and just missed it.

However, if the bribery had ended, why did they install any at all? Is there some silly regulation saying they have to have a small number?

And these houses would have been completed before 31st March 2019.

[Commander Kinsey]

Agreed - you might aswell make as much use of the roof space as you can. And so what if you generate more than the house uses? There are houses that don't generate anything. And once we all use electric cars, we'll need a hell of a lot more.

It also seems damn stupid to build an estate of 50 houses and put 1.2kW on each roof, instead of 2.4kW on half the roofs, with a much lower installation cost.

[Commander Kinsey]

Sorry I thought you knew I lived in the UK.

Irrelevant, you can always make more and it just goes into the grid.

Irrelevant, you can always make more and it just goes into the grid.

[Commander Kinsey]

WTF is solar insulation?

[Commander Kinsey]

Surely you'll make at least roughly what you save by making your own for what you use?

Different people might want it or not.

Yes I know someone who did that on his farm, filling an entire field, but it was only economically viable because of a subsidy.

[Commander Kinsey]

You'd think he'd remember that.

[micky]

I would wait until I saw someone working in the yard, and I'd ask him.

If I never saw anyone, I'd ring the doorbell and ask.

If you do these things nicely, people are happy to talk.

[micky]

I read the thread and it's all speculation. Right off the bat, I can think of two times I stopped to ask a homeowner a question.

One time it was an old house on what's left of the old road from Baltimore to Harrisburg**. He talked for 5 minutes and then invited me to come back and he'd show me the inside of the house.

**It's not labeled like that. You have to figure it out.

Another time I was interested in the coal-miner strike in Harlan Co. Kentucky, and I picked a guy at random in a pretty suburban n'hood, the first guy I picked, and his father was one of the strikers and he remembered a lot of details. He talked to me for about 20 minutes.

Smile, introduce yourself, make it clear you're just curious (not a tax assessor, bill collector, politician, or whoever get's the bum's rush in Scotland.)

[harry]

Cuts the electricity bill. Especially if you're retired and at home through the day.

[Andy Burns]

£7k plus the cost of any repairs for 4kW of panels that will generate say £250 worth of electricity a year, 28 year payback?

Presume you *are* still allowed to grid-tie and drive the meter backwards if you're at work when the sun shines?

[Chris Hogg]

Harry will tell you how much money he's made out of the scheme, how the panels have paid for themselves several times over etc etc. But it's all at the expense of the rest of us, which he doesn't care about. I'm glad it's come to an end for new-builds. The sooner it's stopped for existing installations as well, the better IMO.

[Chris J Dixon]

Your meter is not supposed to be allowed to run backwards. That used to be one of the questions you had to answer when signing up.

Chris

[Andy Burns]

If they couldn't be bothered fitting export meters when they were accepting installations on FITs, surely they won't start fitting them now? What other option is there than to let it go backwards during the day if you're not using what your panels generate?

[T i m]

<snip>

/////scam?

Which only further emphasis just how broken harry's moral compass is and why most of what he says is going to be (morally especially) questionable.

Quite.

Pay for them yourself and put them on your own property if you want.

Get paid the std commercial rate for any energy (and only any energy) you export.

If you expect to get paid a higher than reasonable rate for any energy you export when you can't use it, expect to be charged more for any you use when we all need it (like when it's dark and cold).

The idea that stealing money off all electricity consumers to provide a cash cow for a tiny minority of immoral people would create a massive wave of uptake of these panels was obviously bogus. Again, like the Brexit scam, something some of us suspected from the beginning.

If something is actually 'a good idea', it's likely to be considered so by 'most people' (once / after the real / truthful facts have been made available of course).

Cheers, T i m

[Chris J Dixon]

Many mechanical meters include a little ratchet mechanism so that it will only run forwards. I believe that there is a symbol on the data plate to indicate this.

Electronic meters can be programed in various ways.

One of the more interesting problems came up in discussion on a forum on Moneysavingexpert. A particular model of electronic meter was, we discovered by reading available manuals online, capable of measuring and displaying both power used and power exported.

However, it could also be configured, presumably as a fraud prevention measure, to add the two quantities (no minus sign) and display the total. This meant that fitting PV panels actually put up the electricity bill.

This apparently caught out quite a few customers.

Chris