Who amongst us have gone solar

That's great to hear and I'm in the process of getting body corp approval now. Do you think a 2kW system is enough for a 2 bed unit? Were you also able to increase the rent much or did your PM tell you if it adds much value?

 

For comparison, my wife and I are using 14.5kWh a day for a 4 bedroom house, which incudes RC air con zoned heating over Canberra's cold winters during waking hours, zoned cooling 24/7 in summer, hot water (heat pump) and induction cooking.

About a year ago we added extra ceiling insulation to total about R6, sealed off air leaks and put insulating film on all windows and this has made a major improvement to room comfort and a commensurate reduction in electricity consumption. eg. During the hottest part of a 35C day our family room air con would use about 500W average to keep the 50m2 area cooled to 24C.

We have 3.72kW solar power, which easily covers our consumption during the day and on average we export more than 50% to the grid. If we weren't home all day this export amount would be even higher making payback of our solar system take longer. If battery storage was cost effective it would solve this, but not at current prices. In my case, it will take battery storage to drop in price to $5K installed for around 7kWh capacity before I will take it up.

 

@Stoffo why is there a poll option which says "Nope, live in an apartment/strata/unit"

 

Good point @nambis
At the time i hadn't heard of anyone having managed to get one on an apartment.
There is even a program in SA, (i think it was) where they are installing panels to supply the multi storey apartment building.
Who knows where the old "eco cart" will take us
I would like to end up with batteries eventually
Would also love a Tesla vehicle, one day

 

If you were to get a big enough solar system (or smaller AC) then YES, you should be able to offset the running costs.

On a side note, my neighbor was told at the time of installation to run things during the day to effectively "use his power" as you'll get bugger all for it feeding back into the grid.
His first bill was double and he couldn't understand why, he is rarely home during the day.....
After talking about it, I deduced that he decided to increase the hours "he ran his small pool's pump/filter to 9 hours a day" may be OK on sunny days, but when it's overcast and raining... DUH

 

Must be an old fridge or an extension cord to a neighbors house maybe. . .

 

Today was a big day (sort of) for us.

Even though we installed panels and then batteries for power reliability reasons and not for financial ones, today our power savings equalled the price of our initial solar array. Now to pay off our batteries and our second solar array.

We have a lot of electrical equipment (and toys). Our house consumes on average 30kWh per day and our pool 13kWh per day (a 100,000 litre pool). So a total of 43 kWh per day.

Luckily, we buy in at 22c and export at 50c

 

I did wonder about that. I'm using more power now than I did in Canberra, and I had a 4 bedroom house there with so many things plugged in and turned on all the time. Just seems crazy! Thankfully I'm moving to a non-queenslander home in a couple of weeks, I'm hoping my bills will really reduce.

 

The unit is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath and I got a 2.5kw with 7x250 watt panels. I haven't increased the rent.

While searching for the info above, I ended up seeing some of the correspondence with the body corp and I had forgotten that it was actually a pain in the arse to get approval.
It took them 6 months of me chasing them. I believe they were waiting for committee meetings to get approval. Also they initially asked me for an engineers report to determine the roof could hold the panels.
I had a lot of problems getting engineers interested in providing this report and they said it was completely unnecessary. My tenant also found out that the other unit who did have panels already did not have to get any report done.
I went back to the body corp and said no engineer will complete the report, all have said it's unnecessary and the other unit owner on site didn't have to get one done. They ended up saying ok it's approved.
I think I may have just unlucky with the person I was dealing with in the office.

 

After our 41C day yesterday and air conditioners running most of the day and night, our electricity consumption cost for the day (even at country NSW rip off electricity rates) was only 28 cents. Gotta love solar!

 

The first national audit of batteries that store solar power shows almost 7,000 were installed in Australian homes last year — and that's predicted to triple this year.

Solar batteries 'exploding' in popularity with uptake tipped to triple: audit

 

Lithium-ion battery storage may be banned inside Australian homes

 

There's an update to this article where they state they aren't trying to ban them at all.

Standards Australia delays storage guidelines after protests

 

first "bill" after 3 months living here, $495 credit. Not bad at all, will be interesting to see how it goes through winter. Average usage of 8.8kwh a day, about half what we were at in our old house which seems odd but it has been a fairly mild summer around here with very little air-con usage.

 

Wow!!! From our experience, $495 is very good.

We received our latest bill last night: $234 credit. The previous bill: $152 credit. That is, $386 credit over last 6 months - I might ask them to "send me the money".

Don't forget this is the power you bought from the grid. It does not include any power that you generated and consumed from your panels.

From last night's bill, our average was 29.5kWh per day with the house consuming 17.3kWh and our pool consuming 12.2kWh.

This is the power we bought from the grid. From my reading of my inverters and meters, I know our house total power usage is 28kWh per day, with 18.4 from the grid, 4.8 from our panels and 4.8 from our batteries.

Add 12kWh per day for the pool and our total power consumption (grid, solar and batteries) is 40kWh per day.

This probably seems high but our house has its own effluent plant, a large pool and a lot of electric gadgets.

Did the old house have panels?

You need to ensure you are comparing total power consumption of the new house vs the total power consumption of the old house.

 

ahh yup, makes sense. Didnt consider the whole power in v power out on the total usage.

 

Great Topic. New to the solar world and just read through these posts and some great information!!

We just purchased purchased a PPOR and it already has solar installed. It's a Sunnyboy inverter I believe 6.2kw with 24 or 26 panels. Its only about 18 months old so it was a good score that it came with the house! Moving in next month so will be interesting to see the bills. Never had solar before.

Would you guys recommend a battery for this kind of set up, as we had no initial outlay for the solar system apart from the 500kplus for the house , I could justify spending the money on a battery.

What is the actual benefit of having the battery ? Is the fact that if you are producing more energy then you are useing the excess is stored for future use? But then you obviously wouldn't be receiving a rebate for your exported energy back to the grid is that correct?

 

@magyar, do you know your feed-in tariff?

 

Won't be much. It's only a new system and from the looks of things the average feed in tariff is about 6cents. Some companies were offering up to 10cents as of end of last year but I think it's safe to say it will be standard 6c.

 

Yes, if using solar to charge your battery, you have to subtract your feed-in-tariff (FIT) rate from the rate you save at the time you use the energy from the battery. Eg. In my case my FIT is 6c per kWh and my evening rate is 23c per kWh, so I would save 17c per kWh. If I got a 5 kWh battery, it gets fully charged by solar and I use all 5 kWh every day, that saves me $0.85 a day ie. $310 per year.

Of course, not every day is sunny, I use some of the battery energy at cheaper off peak times (eg. 13c per kWh for me 10pm-7am weekdays, all weekend) and I may not always use the full 5 kWh in a day, so round that yearly saving down to $250. Over 10 years that's $2500 savings and, since most current batteries are lifed at 10 years, my battery + installation had better cost less than $2500 just to break even, which is WAY below current pricing. Yes, electricity rates will go up over time, but storage capacity will also decline over the year roughly evening it out.

For me, current battery + install prices need to drop by at least 50% before they'd provide an actual ROI I'd consider. If your FIT is higher and/or your average grid rate is lower then the price drop needs to be even higher. In short, do your own sums first!