Homeowner Blog

Whether you’re looking to buy a house with solar panels or it’s come time to sell your property and its PV system, you may have some questions. We’ve gathered the common queries to answer based on our years of experience supporting solar PV owners.

We’re regularly contacted by customers, who have received an unsolicited call or letter from another company, offering them a ‘free solar panel health check’ or warning about their solar PV system being at risk of failing. This is a common scam.

Getting your latest electricity bill is rarely a fun experience, yet it seems to become ever more painful. The national grid has undergone a huge transformation in the past decade from coal-heavy to embracing wind and solar, the costs of which have crashed. So there’s a logical disconnect - why are electricity prices rising if renewables are getting cheaper?

Obviously during the current lockdown, you should only drive if it is absolutely essential. But while in isolation, you may be thinking about your next car and what effect the COVID-19 outbreak might have on the growing EV market.

So, is now the time to buy an electric car?

We’d like to reassure you that we are determined to serve our customers and continue driving the switch to renewable energy during the COVID-19 outbreak.

We are following government advice to keep our staff and customers safe, and will update you on any changes to our operations.

Many of our customers are keen to use the greenest energy possible in their home. There are substantial benefits (whether you have solar panels or not), from cutting your carbon footprint to maximising bill savings and energy independence.

At the end of January, thousands of homes local to us across Reading, Bracknell and Basingstoke suffered power outages for an average of 3 hours. This past week, Storm Ciara denied over 500,000 of us access to electricity. And last August the country was hit by the worst blackout in a decade, affecting hospitals, trains and over a million people. 

This week saw the government bring forward the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2035.

One of the most pressing challenges in encouraging people to switch to electric cars is building an extensive charging network. Most people charge at home, but there is always going to be a time when you need to top up on the go. A novel solution is to bolster the number of available chargers by opening up privately owned points for public use - peer-to-peer (P2P) electric vehicle charging.

More and more of us are becoming aware of the urgency of the need to decarbonise our lifestyles. The latest warning from the IPCC gives us only 10 years to cut global emissions in half, or risk catastrophic damage to our climate. Whether you’ve gone solar or not, you may be thinking about how to reduce your carbon footprint. But where do you start?

The new year kicked off with the introduction of the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG), which came into law on January 1st. It’s the long awaited return of a scheme to ensure solar PV owners are paid for the power they send to the grid, ending the policy void that’s existed since the Feed-in Tariff closed to new applicants last March.

According to the SEG, energy suppliers with over 150,000 customers must offer an export tariff with a rate greater than zero. The SEG is available for customers with an MCS-certified renewable energy system under 5MW and a smart meter.

With zero as the minimum, at the very least you can’t be charged for being relieved of excess solar power. However, suppliers don’t have to give you very much for it. So how much are they offering in practice?