I've got a decent sized extension on the back of my house with a flat roof, it gets the sun through most of the day and in my 'unprofessional' opinion is ideal to put some solar panels as nobody could see them either.

Has anyone on here got any experience of providing their home with a bit of solar power?

 

Hi,

I work for a ''leccy provider'' and we were recently informed the standard installation set up for a photo-voltaic solar set up is around £12k, so if you think you can adequately recoup that amount of shell-out in a reasonable time, then hell yeah, go for it................I would doubt most could justify it.

Spend the 12k on your motor or just the rest of the house, and continue to pay the bills...............imho.

 

Fuck me, I guess doing it yourself is much cheaper from what i've read but that does mean the design of the system would be down to me.....and probably wont end up being as 'slick' as a pro install.

Hmm, food for thought!

 

quite often I produce feasibility reports on photovoltaics for large buildings (commercial) in London...

yet to make the recommendation to install solar / wind turbines etc.... to recoup the costs exceeds the lifetime of the building... financially not viable..

ground source heat pumps are quite interesting though...

If your doing it for sustainabilty purposes and not to save money, then go for it

 

are you talking about solar power to generate electricity or heat water?

either way, i would not bother in this country as the cost is quite high and the technology will soon be made largely redundant due to fuel cell combined heat and power boilers becoming commonplace in the domestic environment

 

I was thinking of Electricity, a Grid-on system to sell the surplus back to the Grid.......

I'm just gathering as much info as poss at the mo, it's half motivated by cashflow and half by sustainability. Altho I dont know the environmental impact of making/disposing of solar panels anyway, it may well be far worse than the carbon impact of the electricity I buy!

Tell me more about these boilers.....

 

Info on various types of CHP ( Combined Heat and Power ) boilers can be found on here............

http://www.envocare.co.uk/combined_heat_and_power.htm

Brian

 

that's a reasonable article for the general background info and principles things have moved on since that was written in 2006 though, so a bit more research might find something more relevant to today's situation, particularly regarding micro CHP fuel cell boilers and british gas