Energise Your Solar PV Savings With Solar Expert Chris Sadler

Chris Sadler, CEO of Kimble Solar, takes us through an in-depth review of how solar PV systems are designed, what you can do at the design stage to ensure the best ROI, and what you can do to maintain that performance in the long-term.

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Established in 2011, Kimble Solar is a family-run renewable energy-focused electrical contracting business based in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. Founded by Mechanical Engineering Graduate (and Renewables Nerd), Chris Sadler, Kimble Solar is an award-winning company full of passion, personal touches, and 5-star customer experiences.

[Music] hi I’m Chris Sadler CEO and founder of Kimble Tech limited and this video today is for those who are interested in getting solar panels and want to know a little bit more information around the subject now I’ve got loads of tips and tricks on things that you can do at the design stage things for you to look out for um and things that you could do to improve your return on investment um we’re going to go through uh um some obviously all of these tips and tricks but also at the end I’ve got some real life case studies that we can look at how customers have been using their um their their solar and their battery so really good useful information real-time information that you can use so let’s get cracking with the presentation so unleashing solar potential how to supercharge your return on investment this is all about getting your money back as as quickly and as profitably as possible because for most people that’s why we’re going into solar so why solar panels How is solar return on investment predicted this is like how we do it uh cost of energy energy consumption and solar Radiance levels these three things are how uh Roi is predicted so we’ll go through like how we sort of break those things down we’ve got system strategy how to improve your return on investment Break Even Point that’s when effectively the the the time Milestone when you get your money back uh how to reach that sooner and we’re going to look at real life case studies so just before we go into that just a little bit about who we are so as I mentioned um I am the CEO and founder of Kimble Tech limited we’ve rebranded as Kimble solar we’re an award-winning company based in highwick uh we specialize in renewable energy installations so that’s solar panels battery storage EV charge points and generally speaking we like to be in things renewable so uh we’re on the lookout for the next Technologies and we’ll be expanding into those areas and uh we’ve established in 2011 by myself and the company’s been growing nicely ever since so on to why choose solar panels so there’s we’ve really found there’s three reasons why people come to solar and the first the main one right is to reduce energy bills that seems to be the biggest one and can’t blame you right the other thing is to ensure energy security so this is where perhaps we’re not too comfortable with grid having the um you know the grip on us if they increase energy prices then we’re at the mercy of that so a lot of our customers want to have that security where they can generate as much of their own energy as possible so they’re not relying on the grid and last of all there’s reducing carbon footprint and sadly for me this is the the the smallest category but really for me this for me personally this is the biggest one and um that’s why I’ve started kimal solar and why come on this journey How is solar energy return on investment predicted as I mentioned there’s three reasons energy consumption cost of energy and solar generation these three factors will play their part in predicting your return on investment let’s look at cost of energy to begin with so this graph here shows from January 2015 all the way through to January 2023 and as you can see it’s been fairly predictable through the the lates of between 2015 and 201 20 but by the time we get to 2021 as we know uh any things start to get a little bit unstable and of course it’s been shooting up and down now historically the energy prices have gone up and down we’ve seen this at uh petrol stations when suddenly price of fuel increases then it drops again so the cost of energy is going to play a massive factor in how quickly you’re going to get your money back if the cost of energy is going to increase rapidly and go Skyhigh then of course if you got your own if you’re generating your own energy you’re going to get it back quicker if the cost of energy drops it’s going to have the reverse effect the the thing about the cost of energy is it is unpredictable so it is going to be difficult to say when you’re going to get your return on investment the only thing we’ve got to go on is if we look back over the say 40 50 years um energy generally increases around about 4% in comparison to inflation around about 3 and a half to 4% per year so we use that in our calculations that year on year you’re going to just see a slight increase in the cost of energy and that’s again based over a 40 to 50e period the other thing that’s going to change is your energy consumption so moving on to point number two this is where you have to look at your uh not just your usage now but where you’re going to be in five 10 15 years time panel warranties Go 25 years is a fairly standard warranty and uh and we see some of them go to 30 years inverters and batteries they’re they’re good for most of them 10 years as their warranty um and so really with the solar system we’re looking at a 30-year product here and what’s your energy consumption going to be like in 30 years time or over that 30-year period uh it’s going to change massively so when we when we try to predict how much energy we’re using we have to sort of look at least 5 years ahead possibly 10 years and really try and map out the you know I this is what we do we map out the next 10 years for you and think what’s going to change have you got children who are about to go to university and um flee The Nest uh are they are children going to be coming back from University and living with you again for for many years uh are you a young couple who’s about to maybe have kids or uh have you retired and uh so all of these things are going to change your consumption but not just like who’s going to be in your home but also what you may or may not be using so uh the first one on the screen here is household appliances uh air fryers right these have just come into to Fashion I haven’t got one yet but I’d like to get one but air fryer seem to be the end thing at the moment and this is obviously changing your how you use your energy um I’ve sorry I’ve covered people in the home already so that’s um we’ve we’ve done that one but heat pumps electric vehicles electric boilers we are going to see a shift of how you heat your homes and electric boilers are one way heat pumps or another but these all use electricity in order to get your your heating so again um are you likely to be changing your boiler in the next 5 to 10 years the answer is probably yes so that’s something that we need to think about uh elect Vehicles as well and for most people it’s it’s going to happen in the next 5 to 10 years you will have an electric vehicle if not sooner outbuildings um this is again something we’re seeing a lot recently the last few years is becoming more and more common that people are having their uh I I think from working from home more than anything uh this is becoming more and more common that people work from home and they need their office space so we are seeing a lot of people having their own um man caves or you know remote offices in in their Gardens being built and again this is a space that needs Heating and it also means you’re going to be there throughout the day with computers plugged in and uh perhaps boarding the castle a few times with making your Cups of Tea and coffees so the other thing we’re noticing is that there is a rise in people wanting luxuries like hot tubs and saers and this is another question you have to ask yourself are you likely to want to expand on your existing setup and take on such luxuries this will all play you know these things need heating that’s going to take a a lot of energy so and what time of day is it going to take up the energy that will help you to determine what size solar system you should get what size battery system should go with it as well and last of all we’ve got on here is the lifestyle and Circumstance so changes in perhaps your work if your if your job changes you might find yourself suddenly working from home more often or going to the office more often so if you know what your lifestyle circumstances are going to be like in the next 5 to 10 years then of course we can start to factor that in as well solar generation is this is the third point and actually of all of them this is probably the most predictable okay the UK weather despite its impredecible so if you look at this diagram here this chart it goes back to 1980 all the way through to 2022 every 11 years it it sort of dips up and down but if we’re looking at a 30-year product I mean that’s three solar cycles and and actually if you look at the line here it doesn’t go it doesn’t rise over time or go up or down so if we’re looking over 30 years it’s actually quite predictable um the the UK weather go figure okay so there are the three reasons and we we take those three components we do the best we can at predicting all three of them and we put it together and that generates your return on investment okay moving on to system strategy so as I mentioned earlier there’s three main reasons why you would go into solar now the first one is to reduce your energy bills what’s the strategy if you want to reduce your energy bills in this case is to optimize return on investment and by doing that you you get a we want to design the solar system to hit the sweet spot and I’m going to go into what The Sweet Spot is in a minute um so this is where every penny you spend will bring you the best return on investment for that amount so that’s um the strategy for reducing energy bills the next thing is energy security and the strategy here is basically go big okay the more solar panels you have the more security you have it’s as simple as that the only thing is of course that is going to generally push spend up so often that strategy people tend to go back to the return on investment strategy and the third thing is reducing carbon footprint and for reducing carbon footprint in this case anything helps if you get one solar panel you’re already doing better than having none yeah if you go for 10 panels 20 panels 30 panels if you go for more panels than you need then you’re going to start exporting to the grid and that means you’re helping the the greater good if you only have enough to do what you need to do that’s brilliant even if you only got enough to do 10% of what you’re doing you’re still reducing your carbon footprint so really that becomes a uh you just have to decide how much money you want to put down to reducing your carbon footprint anything helps now I’ll I’ll turn to doing a bit of doodling and uh so if you take a look at this drawing here or this graph here this is a this this is typically how we see um the cost of a system way up against the annual savings that you can expect from that system now I’m going to start drawing on here please do excuse my handwriting because it’s the not the greatest with a with an iPad pen um right so first of all on the horizontal axis here we’ve got the cost of the system so the more expensive systems are over here and the the Lesser cost systems are over here now on the vertical axis we’ve got annual savings so here we’ve got little savings and up here we’ve got big savings I just going to take them off so it make it clearer again right what we tend to find here this this black curve that you can see here this is typically the the curve that we see when we are pricing up systems now let’s take for example A system that doesn’t cost too much like down here for example and I’m going to use a rot of this you know so here is our system which which uh comes up to this price point here and in return you’re getting a pretty low return on investment here we go this is your return on investment if you were to perhaps increase the cost of the system to maybe just pay not a great deal more but instantly we are now coming up to from where it meets the line we’ve now just by doing a small increase in the cost of the system we are now making a big increase in our annual savings so here is where we want to find out what can we do what small things can we do that’s going to increase the system cost but then really really impact our annual savings give us the best return as possible now let’s say you then say ah you know what I want to spend a little bit more on my system well that’s good so let’s say we go again and we we we spend again and of course you’re going to get another return on investment which is again we really pushed the savings up now this is this part here is where you have to say is that worth the the extra increase and of course by the time we get to this price point here you’re going to have to say is that an amount you’re willing to invest in but now here’s the point we have to be careful of and I’m going to do this in red because it’s say no no I’m going to do it in green sorry I’m going to do it in green so let’s say we’re going to spend some more on our system we’re really loving spending money on our solar system because we can see the return investment and we want to spend that a little bit more so now we come up to this point and as you can see guess what we are going to make more savings however the amount of saving we’re now making is actually decreased so really spending that bit more we’re only getting that little bit more out of it and then we we basically passed the point of Break Even or pass the point we’re in the point of diminishing returns so the the the more you spend on your solar system you’re only going to start to see small increases so I’m going to put a red dot on this one here really our our best returnal investment point is here this is The Sweet Spot and that’s really the bullone that’s where we’re trying to what we’re trying to hit so when we’re doing your predictions uh if it’s return on investment or supercharging your return on investment it’s the Red Dot that’s where we want to be getting to and um and really if you want to if you do want to spend a bit more we’ll certainly see that you will you’ll increase your annual savings now these um the Blue Area this this uh this blue area so from here to here sorry excuse me from here to here this is your Roi band this is looking really messy now so I do apologize if this is uh offending anybody and then after that if it’s all about energy security and this is where you want to go bigger then I would say that this is your the green area this is your energy security there you go ES so it’s going just beyond the point of return on investment but it’s where you’re willing to spend that a little bit more to improve on your annual savings and then of course the the third thing is reducing your carbon footprint and of course for me that means you could be anywhere on this graph because whatever you spend you are going to get money back on it but you are going to reduce your carbon footprint so hopefully all those scribbles didn’t uh bamboozle you too much all right I’m going to move on now to how do I positively impact return on investment what are the uh the tips you can do adding a battery for me this is a no-brainer um the battery you you will need and I’ll show you later on in the case studies why is the battery important well because when when your panels are generating solar energy they’re usually generating more than you need because you don’t necessarily need it in the daytime and they’re producing um you know way more than you need and then suddenly when you do need it it’s usually in the evening and that’s when the sun’s gone down and your panels aren’t performing anymore and then you need that energy and that is obviously the the biggest reason why you would need a battery but um on top of that there’s also throughout the day you’re going to get times when your solar panels are only doing only producing a small amount of energy but they’re slowly topping up your battery and then when you suddenly need that Rush of energy uh because the battery’s been topped up it can now deliver the amount of energy you need so when you pop the castle on suddenly the battery can fill your needs so batteries are proven as a really good way to impact your return investment and maximizing panel grouping now if you’re if you’re at a stage where you’re looking at your roof and you’re thinking where could I put my panels you probably already know a panel is roughly a meter wide by about 2 m tall not quite those Dimensions but you know as as a rough sizing guide um if you can get them all together so that they are in a nice grid and they’re bunched up in a nice square or rectangle that is the most effective way for you to get a good return on investment if you start splitting them onto separate roof faces or or having to leave gaps or change orientations all of those things start to slow down the installation process and they can have a negative effect on your return of investment so where possible get them all uh all grouped together and uh I mean I apologize if I haven’t covered this already but south facing is the roof space you want to be on so if you’re still looking at your house uh which roof faces South that’s the roof you want to be on if you’ve got a your house is pretty much West and east facing then of course either of those is a good option for you um and again there there’s a reason why you might choose East over West or do both if you can and to positively impact your return on investment is facturing your 10-year plan which I covered earlier and by doing that it means you’re getting a real a very realistic view on uh what your what your energy consumption is going to look like in over the next 10 years so you’re designing the system to meet your demand Break Even point point so the break even point is when your electricity bill savings and your smart export guarantee payments have met the cost of the installation so smart export guarantee is when the grid will pay you money to export electricity before we had battery storage this was quite important because you would always be exporting anything you didn’t use you exported so if you could get paid for that that energy that you’re exporting then it’s really going to help you know improve your break even point now that we’ve got battery storage and ways of using the energy at source um export guarantee payments aren’t as uh as as important and generally the rate is quite small but there are some good tariffs out there and if you are quite clever with your choice of tariff you can get yourself into um you can find yourself some tariffs that will pay you uh reward you very well for exporting especially exporting at certain times of the day so when your electricity bill savings and the payments you’re going to get from your smart export guarantee once you add them together when that meets the cost of the installation then that is your break even point and this here is an example of one of uh one of the jobs that we’ve priced up and you can see over here the cost of the installation was around about 20,000 over 20 years their net saving is going to be £62,000 and what this means is the payback was calculated at around 7 years and 5 months this is just a a a typical installation an example of how that might look there we go typ example taken from a client’s quotation pack how can you reach Break Even Point sooner so this isn’t things that you can necessarily do after having it installed but this is certainly things you can start to um or tips that you can implement or make sure that you uh have the included in your quotation package so when you’re shopping around solar these are things that could really help you achieve Break Even points sooner adding bird proofing birds or particular pigeons are the Nemesis of solar panels they like to Nest underneath the panels and when they do that they then like to hang around outside the solar panels they like to peer on the edges of or or perch themselves on the edge of the solar panels and then they create a lot of mess when they create mess it makes shading the panels underperform and your system your Roi just disappears so adding bird proofing is a great way to stop the pige from nesting there in the first place they’re going to go Nest somewhere else they’re going to hang around over there they’re not generally going to hang around on your roof anymore so that is the number one reason for adding bird proofing there is um argument that it helps reduce uh stop other pests from getting in there um nests themselves can create a bit of a heating issue they can know at the cables things like that so there are other benefits but the main benefit is definitely keeping the pigeons away and stopping them from messing on your panels panel maintenance following on um if you can keep your panels clean you are going to get the best out of them it’s as simple as that now generally speaking panels are selfcleaning they do have if especially if they are at a 30 or 45 degree angle generally with the rain water it will help to keep them clean if you got a flat roof system or panels at a very shallow angle then you definitely want to be cleaning them ideally annually at the least ideally maybe every 6 months uh or ultimately check your app keep keep checking in on your app make see see how you’re generating try and have a reference so you know what you maybe should be generating and and keep inspecting them have a look at them if they look dirty get them cleaned um you can see here a nice long brush with a hose pipe uh as long as it is a not nothing too abrasive then um usually just water and and a soft broom is all that’s needed keep trees and bushes trimmed so again trees and bushes they generally create shading or can create shading on the panels and uh shading again will massively underperform your system um something I haven’t covered yet but generally speaking most panels are they’re done in what call strings so the way the string works is think of it like a a single hose pipe if you create a kink anywhere in that hose pipe then the water will just stop flowing and solar panels are very much they work in a similar manner the solar panels are in strings so that they’re in series they’re in a long line if one p panel has a bit of shading on it it’s like squeezing the hose pipe and suddenly the energy just stops flowing through them so even if one panel was shaded and 10 panels weren’t you’re going to get the whole system performing at the the Shaded panels level so it’s going to massively underperform so that’s why it’s really important if you can keep trees and bushes trimmed so as we know they they tend to Hedges especially tend to get taller and taller over time and if it you know after a couple of years you might look out and go actually I didn’t realize but my panels are now in shade because I didn’t trim my trees and keep them U locked down so yeah that is that is that one uh add optimizers so to do this to retrofit optimizers is doable it’s obviously great if you can get it in there at the very beginning but optimizers will just help with the shading issue and help if any panel does underperform uh so that’s where the panel might break down without you knowing about it uh if a panel does get a load of debris on it or if there is um a shading issue so optimizers will help to remove any of the uh negative effects of that and allow the rest of the array to perform at its Optimum okay so the next thing you could do is install an electric vehicle charge point now I just want to give you sort of like the the the strategy here the strategy is generally don’t export the energy if you can use your solar energy direct at source that is the best thing you can do so when it’s generating if you can use that directly so put the washing machine on or you know run the oven when that’s running then brilliant that is the best thing you can do the second best thing you can do is store it into an energy source where you can get it back out again so therefore your home battery you can store the energy into that easily and you can get it back out again when you need it to if you can’t do that or your batter is full then what does the energy go out to the grid no if you’ve got an electric vehicle charge point you can take that energy and you can put it into your vehicle now this particular electric vehicle charge point is a zappy and there are other brands out there as well or other models that will do solar charging and what it is it it basically listens for when you’re exporting energy and in and then it turns the car on it will charge the car up at the rate you’re exporting so effectively you’re taking all of that energy and you’re putting it into your vehicle and again that’s the best way for you to get your breake even Point um achieve that point sooner so there is a bit of a misconception at the moment where you can power your home from your vehicle now this is called vehicle to grid and it is going to come eventually but it’s still in its infancy so we won’t hold fire for that one at the moment but certainly being able to charge your vehicle from your solar panels that’s absolutely happening right now and you should be doing it right the next thing we’ve got is uh hot water diverters and the product I’ve shown here is an Eddie which is also made by my energy the same people that make the zappy so my energy are a British company and they have a full range of batteries inverters EV charge points and these hot water diverters so what happens is the Eddie will monitor the grid to see if you’re exporting any energy now if you are losing energy to the grid then instead it will divert that energy into your hot water cylinder and heat up your hot water now typically your gas boiler would be doing uh heating up your hot water cylinder but if the Eddie is doing that job in the daytime then typically when you get to the early evening which is where most people would fire up their hot water cylinder and get the gas boiler going well it shouldn’t need to do that then because it’s already up to temperature and that way then you’re not burning gas to heat your hot water so there a very effective product in the summer and certainly some days in the winter you’ll find that your Eddie will kick in especially we it’s really nice sunny days um the Eddie will kick in and you’ll have a lovely tank of hot water for free so we’ve mentioned battery storage already but what I really want to do is lead on to something called Arbitrage now this is where you can charge your batteries at night time using lowc cost electricity and then use those battery that battery power in the daytime instead when it would have otherwise cost you a lot of a lot of money so for those of you that don’t know there are time-based tariffs and economy 7 was one of the first ones that uh rewarded you for using electricity at nighttime and it did that by making the cost of electricity very cheap and then in the daytime it would otherwise be a little bit more expensive so it was in your interest to to buy the electricity or to use it or store it as much as you could at night time and then use that throughout the day now historically they did that using like storage heaters and also using the hot water cylinders ways that you could store heat uh that you would then dissipate that heat throughout the day but now things have moved on and we’ve got the technology batteries are the way that we can do that so there are tariffs now very intelligent tariffs that will give you a a a a narrow window at night time when you can charge up your battery and this can be from 4 hours 5 hours 6 hours usually up to about 7 hours and there are so many tariffs out there so you have to do a bit of shopping around to find out which one suits you best but especially since we’ve had people getting electric vehicles there are a lot of tffs that will give you 4 hours of charging um overnight and you can do the same with your batteries you can charge it up using a really really lowc cost price unit price for your electricity and then use that in the daytime you just got to be mindful that your uh that you have a big enough battery to do this you see the downside of switching to a time-based tariff is that although at night time the price of electricity will drop but the differences in the daytime it usually becomes more expensive so there is a trade-off when you do this you’ve got to make sure you’ve got plenty of battery storage that you can really charge them up get them nice and full at night so you’ve got plenty to see you throughout the day if you only got a small battery then of course it’s only going to be a small store a small amount of charge and so make sure you a big battery so you can do that at night and then so then you’ve got plenty of electricity to see you through the next day if you’ve only got a small battery so this is something to think about when you do decide on getting solar and what size battery to get then just think about the Arbitrage option because you will need a sizable battery which will cost uh you know more money than if you just get yourself a real small solar enabled battery so this is something to bear in mind when you are selecting your solar system or the size of battery you want to go with if you have a large battery you can definitely make full use of the Arbitrage and you’ve got the energy to last you throughout the day but if you only have go for a small battery it will keep your system cost down but you won’t really be able to use this Arbitrage option effectively so that is something that you need to think about and ideally ask your um solar provider to give you two illustrations one with a small battery where it is just solar charged only and one with a large battery where you can leverage a a Time based tariff and make full use of the uh of the Arbitrage option and the last thing is smart export guarantee so this is where you get paid to export energy now typically it’s not that rewarding you only get a couple of Pence per kilowatt hour so generally speaking it’s not something that we particularly go after however if you shop around you might find that there are some tariffs that will reward you quite handsomely for exporting at a certain time of day now it doesn’t tend to be that if you just export at any time of day they’ll give you loads of money for it doesn’t tend to happen but what they will do is that they tend to be quite generous if you export between 4: and 7 in the evening so between 4 and 7 that’s typically when your solar panels are coming to the end of the day so they’re not really going to uh generate a great deal but if you’ve got a nice amount of battery storage you you can program your battery to discharge at that time and reward you for uh for for for exporting so there are some tariffs out there you can get quite clever with it um it does sound very complicated I’m not going to lie it is a bit complicated but if you do like that sort of thing there are ways you can really leverage smart export guarantee and Arbitrage and actually make your system work really well for you so all of these sort of things if you factor it all in you can actually get yourself a really good break even point right I’m going to move on now and show you some real case studies okay these are systems that we’ve installed and I’ve chosen three I’ve chosen three sort of different different scenarios different um demographics and I hope that by you seeing this data it’s just a bit of an insight for you um there’s no particular goal here other than for you to see what the actual data looks like so without further Ado I shall move on to case study number one um so this study is a professional couple they work in an office so they’re not at home in the daytime we’ve installed 14 panels it’s 5.7 kwatt hours of battery storage the cost of the system was 16,600 we predicted their Break Even time would be 9 years and their usage was 5,200 kwatt hours per year we estimated their solar generation would be 4,900 KW hours and the estimated savings over 20 years was going to be £40,000 first of all I’m going to show you their load profile and you can see that around about 9: in the morning I think that’s when they probably pop the kettle on maybe that’s when they’re heading out uh looks like they didn’t have much else for breakfast maybe that’s the toaster that went on and throughout the whole day there nothing’s going on there’s just a little bit of background here all of this usage here is this is like a a fridge or a freezer just running in the background there’s not really a great deal going on and it’s not until around about 9 9:20 clearly they get home they probably po pop the kettle on and then from here from around about 8:00 it looks like they must be cooking dinner perhaps put the washing machine on and um and generally speaking that’s all their all their uses in the evening now the generation the solar generation here you can see all of that is done in the daytime so it’s when they’re not there so this one here is an absolute no-brainer you need to get a battery and this here the green is the battery uh this is the the level of battery storage now right here at the beginning of the day they start at 32% so that’s at midnight throughout the day it uh sorry throughout the morning this is like overnight so all the way through till 800 in the morning it’s now at 19% so they’ve used about 10% of their battery storage throughout the night and around about 8: in the morning it starts to go back up again and by 10:00 they are by 10:25 they’re pretty much fully charged again and that’s because they’re not using any electricity and the solar’s kicked in it’s charging up the battery and you can just see here this this this tail off here is just because it doesn’t want to um when when batteries get to about 95% they like to slow really um for battery conditioning they like charge slowly so by midday or by 1 130 the battery is at 100% and uh and actually you can see here now this brown here this is the feed in so actually they spent most of the day feeding in so despite having a 5.7 Kow battery they were actually spent a lot of the day feeding in so just focusing on the battery storage here you can see that at uh about 20 7 when they arri they put the castle on ran their washing machine and that’s when they dissipated the battery throughout the evening and actually by about 9:30 they had fully dissipated the battery down to 10% it’s just a maintenance level of charge there 11% and you know they could have definitely done with more battery storage on this day but we have to balance the system out over the the lifetime of it so because this was a great day in May great day for solar generation they obviously um fill the battery up quickly but then there’s other days when they wouldn’t necessarily need that amount of battery or it certainly wouldn’t have helped their returnal investment by spending more money on more batteries so I’m going to move on to case study 2 this is a retired couple they had seven panels installed and a 2.9 KW battery quite a small system they the system cost 0,300 we predicted their Break Even time would be 13 years their usage perom is 2,000 KW hours so this is quite low usage and and when you have low usage it’s very difficult to get a good returnal investment or a Fast Break Even point so for them 13 years was the best that we could do and their estimated solar generation was 2,800 kwatt hours per year so even with seven panels which doesn’t sound like a lot that was more than what they needed for an annual use and we predict that over the 20 years they will make a saving of 21,300 so here is the profile the the load profile for uh the retired couple and it looks like in the morning they just use a there’s a small Peak around about 735 potentially that’s just the uh boiling the kettle or the coffee machine and then it’s not until uh around about lunchtime when they start to use so that clearly that’s probably coming back for lunchtime I would guess that they popped out in the morning did a bit of shopping came back and and then cooked their lunch at lunchtime and then again probably popped out for the afternoon came back around 6:00 and again maybe used the oven at that point the microwave perhaps and um and then just a little bit of increased usage here that’s possibly running a TV or just something that would have um you know you can see here in the evening it’s just slightly higher than it was throughout the night so again fairly minimal usage this is why they only use 2,000 units per year because they generally have quite low Usage Now in terms of the battery it was a very very small battery that they had but actually when you look at this profile now they start uh at midnight it starts fairly full at 84% and they actually do a top up they they they they do use Arbitrage on their system so they do top it up at 1:00 in the morning and that’s why they start the day with the battery full but throughout the night into and we get to about 8:00 in the morning here it dissipates down to 53% so even though this is a small battery they’re still only getting down to 50% before the solar tops it all back up again so it’s quite interesting that that even a small battery um they’re still working within the limits of it and you can see throughout the day it it goes up to 100% it drops down a bit when they need it and it the solar is topping it back up to 100% again and you know right down here at 9:00 in the evening that’s when the battery gets the minimum and then that’s when the nighttime tariff kicks in and then they charge it back up again so for them actually they’re really making good use of a of of a small 2.9 Kow battery that’s the solo curve here so um this is typically what you can find from the generation it’s very spiky so this would have been a day when uh the clouds were probably coming in and out throughout the day so got a bit of a rise and a fall but you can see generally speaking from about 6:00 in the morning through to 6:00 in the evening it’s a fairly um consistent curve that goes up and up and down peaking around about midday and again this was a this was taken in June so uh but a shady Day in June when the sun was coming in and out in terms of feeding in looks like they actually did a bit of feeding in but um you know not not particularly great amount around about midday when the battery’s full they found themselves feeding in a small amount so again that’s a bit of insight into uh a retired couple that got low usage and typically how a small system works well for them this is a young family of four their kids go to school but the mom stays at home they had 10 panels installed and 11.4 Kow hours of battery storage the cost of the system was £16,000 the break even time we predicted is 7 years the usage perom was 5,000 kwatt hours and the estimated solar generation was 3,900 kwatt hours we estimated that they would um save £58,000 over the course of 20 years so first of all this is the load profile and again you can see that throughout the day I guess at around about 655 that’s when the first load goes on that’s probably the husband putting on the the coffee machine and we’ve got 8:00 here another another Peak that’s probably the toast going in in the toaster for the kids breakfast and then what have we got here around 10:30 in the morning we’ve got for about uh about an hour there is a a pool Lo uh load there that’s probably the washing machine going on washing all the kids clothes and here we go we’ve got a few little blips throughout the morning and then really when it gets to lunchtime uh again oven goes on there’s obviously lunch being cooked uh possibly another washing load going on as well the tumble dryer and then just throughout the day there’s lots of little Peaks where potentially Kettle going on this is 3:35 that’s when the kids get back from the school guess what kettle’s probably gone on again and just here we go 4:40 and 440 around 4:45 o00 again we’ve got the another load going on for a prolonged period of time that’s probably the oven so this family throughout the day they’re using the energy but it’s in spikes it drops down to you know next down to around about 200 Watts um and then it Peaks up to around about 3 Kow throughout the day all the way through to the evening and the last Spike is around about half nine perhaps that was uh again maybe just a a nice cup of tea just before bed so um that’s the load profile now if I overlay the solar on that you can see that the the solar in itself is very peaky as well and this was taken in July sorry in June and very sort of peaky you can see that it Peaks and then it drops down again so again this was a day when there was probably a lot of cloud cover and the sun just came out for a few spells and if you really look here I want I want to pay attention to the yellow graph and the blue graph and how one Peaks at one time and then the other one Peaks at another time so they never actually um well they rarely Peak at the same time time and this is where you need that battery the battery will give you the energy when you need it and store it when you don’t need it and the the green curve here is the battery level and you can again you can see they start the B they start at midnight with the battery at 78% and it only drops down to around 68% before they start to use it in the morning but because they’ve got the solar energy it’s generally holding around 90% for most of the daytime and then they finish the day after all of that they finish the day at 66% so they’re almost finish the day where they started so this system is is very well balanced for them they’ve got um a bit of uh the battery size obviously looks like it might be on the larger size here um but they’ve actually now got a big battery that they can use for for Arbitrage in the winter time which is the reason for them going for it so I hope that’s been really helpful for you lots of little tips and tricks in there um if you do have any questions we are always available for a consultation I’m a bit of a solar geek so do love to talk about all things solar I imagine there’s been a little bit of an information overload there so please do get in touch we can answer your questions uh we’re basic in high Wickam kettle’s always on Biscuit’s always in the biscuit jar uh contact details are on the screen like I said get in touch we’d love to hear from you I’m Chris Adler it’s been a pleasure [Music]