We are solar-charging our house with our roof-top PV panels and a battery.
This is something I had planned ever since we moved in at the end of 2017, but it was complicated by the fact that the survey for the house noted that the house had the original roof, and after 60 years it was coming to the end of its life soon. So it made sense to get solar panels installed at the same time as getting the house re-roofed. That’s an expensive job, so we decided to wait for a five years until we had enough money for a new roof.
That time came in the early summer of 2022, and I started gathering quotes for the PV and battery system and applying for the government funding — an interest-free loan from Home Energy Scotland. I wasn’t expecting how much time this was going to take.
Having waited for five years, I ended up embarking on this project just when everybody else (it seemed) was also scrambling to get solar panels — the entire country was hit by a massive energy price hike following the Russian attack on Ukraine and the economic sanctions that followed, and many households decided that getting solar panels and a battery was a good way to keep the electricity bills down.
This meant that many of the companies I contacted were really busy and had their diaries full for many months, and the Home Energy Scotland hotlines were inundated with enquiries and loan applications. Everything took much longer that it would have five years ago, and it was deep into November when the loan approval finally arrived. Well laid plans of mice and men to get the roof fixed when the summer sun was shining certainly went awry here, with the roofers battling winter storms and torrential rain to replace the old roof. Once the roofers took off the old flaky tiles, disintegrating roof felt and half-rotten battens and fit the new waterproof membrane and fresh woodwork, the solar panel installers turned up to fit the panels and wire them all up before the new tiles were nailed on.
Since we are getting the roof and PV done at the same time, I decided to go for roof-integrated solar panels, which fit directly on the rafters and act as part of the roof covering. This keeps the total weight of the roof down and requires no reinforcement. The solar panels sitting flush with the tiles are also less likely to be ripped up by strong winds and don’t create a handy space for birds to nest. The roof of our house is oriented east-west, so we got eight panels on each side, 16 in total. Although this arrangement is less efficient that a south-facing system, it does generate over a longer period, catching the rays of the sun from sunrise to sunset as it travels across the sky.
All needed now was to installed the inverter and battery, but by now we were in the middle of the worldwide battery shortage and the Christmas holiday period, so the indoor part of the work had to wait until New Year. The system was finally commissioned in mid-January.
The inverter comes with a data logger, which you can access with a mobile app so you can track how much your panels are generating. You can’t expect much, of course, a high-latitude area like Scotland during winter, but Dundee is the sunniest city in Scotland, and I have already developed the habit of opening the app the moment the sun shines and feel all smug watching the bar chart registering solar outputs.