I’m thinking of getting solar panels and a battery for our house.
What’s your setup like, and is there anything you wish you’d set up differently if you were going to install it again? What supplier are you with?
A company extremely local to us is offering 12x Aiko Energy panels (465 watt), with a Sunsynk 5 kW inverter and a 5.32kWh battery. Octopus Energy are offering a similar set up for a similar price, but they’re using 450 watt panels, so with using 12 panels I’d be potentially be losing 180 watts vs what the other company is offering. Is that a significant amount or would it basically not really amount to much additional power?
Cheers for your advice! Honestly it’s extremely unlikely I’d do it myself. I’d need to get at tonne of scaffolding and I wouldn’t know anything about attaching the panels to the roof or doing any of the wiring!
Just chiming in to say that Octopus support DIY builds from non-MCS accredited installers. You can literally self-certify your build and feed it back into their grid.
https://www.pluginsolar.co.uk/?p=9895
Good to know, cheers!
I can fully understand the roof part, that you can always get a roofing contractor for installing they will do it for a lot less and likely much better than a solar installer will. But the wiring is incredibly simple there’s literally just positive and negative on the solar panels. You just put them in series until you hit your desired voltage, then parallel strings after that. Solar panels use nice simple connectors that literally just click together, you plug those into some nice disconnect switches near the inverter and then from the switch to the inverter.
I love DIY maybe too much, but this strongly violates my “nothing structural, nothing roofing” rule.
They are both things I’d want a massive company to be doing, just from the sheer magnitude of the problems if they screw it all up.
Exactly. There’s a high chance of me dropping a panel off the roof, or worse, myself.