Homeowner Blog

With petrol prices at an eight-year high and new fossil fuel powered vehicles due to be banned by 2030, the age of electric cars will soon be upon us. For those of us lucky enough to have a driveway, we can charge up our electric cars at home, making the most of time of use tariffs to slash costs further. But what’s even better than cheap charging? Free charging from the sun!

Solar panels make a great companion to an EV, allowing you to use the car’s substantial battery to absorb excess solar power so you can drive on sunshine. But what are the best solar car chargers to make for an easy peasy EV-PV experience?

With the sun finally out (in passing), you may be wondering if now is the time to join the solar club. Panels are better looking and more powerful than ever before, energy bills are spiking, and perhaps your neighbours are charging their new electric cars from the sun.

But if there’s something holding you back, it may be that classic British concern: property prices. So today we’re going to try and answer the question... do solar panels increase the value of your house?

Today we’re going to take a look at a real world example of an average 4kWp domestic PV system we have installed to understand what affects solar panel output, including factors such as weather, season, angle and orientation.

We’re going to put the batteries, EV chargepoints and hot water units to one side and consider a house with only solar panels fitted. The problem with this setup is that unless the energy is used as it’s generated, it will be exported. This means to get your best payback, you should switch on the dishwasher while it’s sunny, rather than at night.

To get the best annual output, your system would ideally face south at around 35 degrees. The height of the sun in the sky moves quite a lot over the year, so getting the best possible output will not be attainable without a very expensive and complex trackable mounting system. Generally it will always be a compromise on the roof space, orientation and pitch available to you.

In the old days of solar PV, after your system was fitted, the only way to know how much power you produced was from the generation meter ticking up each day, or reading the screen on the inverter.

As inverters got better and integrated with WiFi, they allowed you to track daily, monthly and yearly production figures using your phone or computer. Although, one thing that you could never be sure of is the total amount of PV energy consumed on site.

But times have changed, and there are now much better ways of monitoring solar export and self consumption.

We went to speak to Mark Sanders, one of our most enthusiastic customers, about his experience with solar PV and Tesla Powerwall.

Watch our chat in the video below:

Many of our clients desire energy independence, to be insulated against rising bills and polluting power. It’s one of the most common reasons for investing in solar PV.

This is why we’re always interested in ways to help people use more of the solar power they generate at home, boosting efficiency and saving money. So today we’re looking at a device that can turn surplus solar energy into heating for your house - the eddi.

Image: SolarEdge.

Since solar panels are static, there’s little to actually, well, see when they’re generating. Sure, it’s nice to start receiving smaller energy bills but, if you’re like most of our customers, you’ll want to dig into the performance data every now and then.

As well as checking when the most solar power is being generated (a useful reminder to turn on the dishwasher and make the most of that free electricity), solar monitoring is great for reviewing past output and comparing performance. Sudden drops can indicate faults that need fixing, or help assess if it’s worth giving the panels a clean.

Wondering which solar PV monitoring solutions are the best? Read on...

Last February, when the world was a very different place, Spirit installed SunPower panels in the roof of my new home - read all about the installation process here.

So it’s been just over a year now that I’ve been living with solar panels. Although not the best of years, it has been nice to work from home to maximise the use of my own solar energy. But how is my PV system doing? Has it performed anywhere near what my quote promised?

One of the great things about solar power is how scalable the technology is; you can generate electricity on top of an individual streetlamp or a vast solar farm. When it comes to residential PV, we often just think of rooftop arrays, but recently we have seen a rise in interest in domestic ground mounted solar panels.

The main benefit of ground mounts, if you have the land, is that you can choose the optimal orientation to maximise solar generation, which isn’t possible with an existing rooftop. It’s also a great option if your roof isn’t strong enough to support the weight of a solar array. In a ground mount, panels are fixed to a metal frame, which is secured by concrete or pile-driven foundations. But what else do you have to consider?

With all the recent talk of innovative green technologies, we thought we’d take a look at some of the most ingenious - and eccentric - ideas being explored for solar PV.