![](\"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/p\/solar.png\")
\r\nOur solar panels were fitted at the end of the summer, and commissioned on August 30th, so we’ve had them for about four months now. We’re lucky – we got in when FIT payments were guaranteed at around 40p\/KWH – so we’re expecting our 4KW system to pay for itself, when subsidies are taken into account, in about 9 years. So sometime in early 2021, if all goes according to plan, we’ll be raking in free electricity and free money (in the form of FIT payments), which is nice.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
What’s interesting to me is the way my behaviour’s changed. I’ve always been a bit of a tree-hugger, turning off lights, making compost, recycling everything, and putting on jumpers… but I’ve become a bit more strategic since we’ve had the photovoltaics on the roof. We’ll wait until daytime to put on the washing machine or the dishwasher; we won’t use the dishwasher if there’s hot water; we’ll turn more things off at the plug, and we’re generally aware of our background usage (everything nonessential off = 2.5kwh\/day, which is about 100w, which isn’t that bad when you think about it).<\/p>\r\n
And we’re monitoring in a way we never did before. Or rather, Roger’s monitoring, and I’m watching with interest and stealing his graph for my blog:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n
The red line is what we buy off the electric company, the blue line is what we’ve generated. So you can see that here in wild wet and windy west Wales, we’re still making quite a bit of electricity well into Autumn (the graph starts on 30 Aug, and finishes on 19 Dec – x-axis is day, y-axis is KWH). In August there were a few days when we bought virtually nothing – our usage was pretty much entirely covered by the PVs. There’s some smoothing on the graph but the sunny days still stand out. I can’t wait till next summer to see what it does when there are really long days.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
We got solar water done at the same time (it saved money as we only needed to get the scaffolders in once); the benefit of that’s much harder to quantify as there’s no meter and no FIT payments, just free washing up and baths. But I like that too. There’s nothing nicer than getting in after a long bike ride on a sunny day and soaking in a hot tub that’s come from the roof.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
I think that the change in FIT payments is a huge mistake for various reasons – there were about 12 people involved in our installation for a start, only two of whom were directly employed by Llani Solar<\/a>. Scaffolders, electricians, plumbers, general builders… The knock on effect on the local economy is going to be massive. I also think that the behaviour change that comes from having the panels is likely to amplify any ecological benefit from the electricity itself. I heard that Leeds city council recently cancelled installation on 1,000 council homes<\/a>, which has to be seen as a real loss of opportunity.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our solar panels were fitted at the end of the summer, and commissioned on August 30th, so we’ve had them for about four months now. We’re lucky – we got in when FIT payments were guaranteed at around 40p\/KWH – so we’re expecting our 4KW system to pay for itself, when subsidies are taken into account, in about 9 years. So sometime in early 2021, if all goes according to plan, we’ll be raking in free electricity and free money (in the form of FIT payments), which is nice. What’s interesting to me is the way my behaviour’s changed. I’ve always been a bit ofRead More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-admin","post-817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-wales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=817"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":824,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817\/revisions\/824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}