When shopping around for solar, always check the guarantee. Solar panels typically offer a lifetime guarantee, but it's best to check. Of course, a guarantee is only as good as the continued commercial existence of the providing company to honour it, so best not to skimp by using a fly-by-night installer.
Batteries unavoidably deteriorate over time and eventually have to be replaced, the good news being that, by that time, you can hope battery technology has advanced to a new generation with massively increased storage capacity, which would be a significant money saver, enabling retention of much greater amounts of electricity for use in the house, rather than the less-profitable exporting of surplus back to the electricity company.
Surprisingly, it is the minor components of the system that can leave you seriously out of pocket. You will naturally want to use an app to monitor your solar performance, Ours uses a tiny gadget called a "stick logger", which plugs into the solar cabinet and sends a signal to our house wi-fi, which the app uses to get the information about our generated electricity. The first stick logger developed a fault after only a year. It was replaced under the guarantee. Another minor component failed shortly after. This one monitored the system to tell the solar when to divert electricity to the immersion heater. So until we had it repaired, we lost the benfit of solar-heated water. Again, the guarantee covered the repair.
Things got bad when the replacement stick logger from the previous repair also failed. Now we were out of guarantee. The solar company offered us a repair costing nearly 400 Euro. That would wipe out two-thirds of this year's benefit of electricity sold back to the electricity company! And we have an 18 panel system. If someone only had 6 panels, they'd effectively be losing two years benefit on a minor repair!
To be a little bit technical, it wasn't the stick logger itself that failed but a plug-in gadget it was paired with that did the actual transfer of the signal to our wi-fi system. The repair would involve plugging in a new gadget (which I researched on the internet as costing 50 Euro) and pressing two buttons to connect the system up again, so frankly a 400 Euro repair job would be a total rip-off.
To be fair on the company, their excellent support guy did tell me how I could very simply repair the system myself by running a standard ethernet cable from the stick logger to my wi-fi router, but then he knew I was technical and would understand the advice he was giving. The only problem was needing a cable long enough to pass under my upstairs floorboards. Luckily, I happened to have a spare running from my office to my garage, so I used that. Problem solved! Or, I could have avoided using the cable altogether by spending just 50 Euro to replace the failed gadget. But then again I am technical and know what to do. This is my main issue with solar, the extent to which ordinary man in the street can be losing out on repairs or on a badly configured system for lack of sufficient information supplied.
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