Solar#1: Our House is Not Suited to Solar Panels?

Our house has two main roof surfaces - one faces roughly East and the other roughly West; my assumption had been that you need a South facing roof to make solar panels worthwhile.

 

Roll on energy price rises in 2022 and I started to wonder if this was true...

 

...in Summer 2023 I was researching the topic more seriously and came across this website:

 

https://www.snugg.com/

 

You enter a few details about your property and it gives you an energy efficiency plan. In writing this post I looked again at the website and it looks more sophisticated now, but even then it gave some useful pointers including a link to this website:

 

https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/tool/solar-energy-calculator/

 

 

After adding a few details you get a simple investment case for solar panels:

• How many panels you can fit on the roof (you can also pick from 1 of 4 standard house sizes - that's what I did)
• Roof pitch (our house has a shallow pitched roof, so I went for 30degrees - it turns out to be 26degrees)
• Direction - there is a really cool tool that shows a Google Maps image of your postcode. You can pick your house and adjust the direction (I later found out that mine is -74degrees from South, ie 16degrees from East, but you don't need to know this to use the tool)

• Estimate of shading (we have none - you can pick from 4 levels)
• You add a little bit on what electrical appliances you have and your lifestyle and then you get the answer.
• For me this initial feedback was:
• Solar is suitable
• Suggesting 12 panels
• Annual savings of £605
• Estimated install cost of £7,000
• Payback of 13years, including for inverter replacement at 12 years.
• One nice feature of the calculator is that you can go back and try out different examples (eg I tried out a South facing house and it did not make that much difference)
• Out of interest I retried this just now with 25degrees roof pitch and the annual savings are now £615 and payback 11 years (I guess that their model has the inverter failing just after the system has paid for itself!).

 

 

This spiked my interest, enough to give two more tasks:

• Investment case - is it worth doing with a payback period of 10 to 15 years?
• Get some supplier quotes - what is the real cost and complexity?

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