I've seen a few people here posting about their solar panels and how much it effects their bills but I've been waiting on mine since last June.
I went with a local company and the same one that did my dad's and my father in laws installation with no problems.
Then we got to my property. I priced at the same time as the father in law and his have been up and running for five months now.
They did come out to install mine the week after his but that's where the problems started. He went with a set on his garage, same as myself. His electricity cable wasn't strong enough to take the feed back to the house, the same as mine.
The difference is that he had an existing duct to run a new cable and they were able to install on the same day that they had planned.
With mine they hadn't done a proper survey and didn't realize until the installers arrived that it was going to be the same issue. The difference was that I didn't have an existing duct to run the cable and it all had to be postponed.
They would need to do groundworks for the install to run a new cable from house to garage and that costs money and needs external contractors.
You can see from the plans where the panels are planned to go and where they will need to run a cable from the garage to half way along the back of the house to the fuse board. About €1K in total on top of the original bill.
They did try to get me to move the panels onto the house but they wouldn't fit there and the few that would fit would look terrible.
They didn't want to cover the extra works and I didn't want to pay an extra grand on top of the quoted price so we were at a bit of an impass.
At the time I was willing to split the difference and pay half if they met in the middle but since then they have been so ignorant and hard to deal with that I changed my tune along the way.
Too may ignored emails and failed attempts to get information. They kept promising to come up with a plan but never came back to us on anything. Every single time it was me chasing them and that's after paying almost 5K of a deposit to the company.
I have to say that their sales rep was very good and when i got onto him they always moved it forward a little bit more but by now I had gotten pissed off with their actions and pushed back on them for the full job, installed start to finish as quoted. They didn't survey properly on day one which led to all of these issues and then refused to help rectify it quickly and easily when i would have been sympathetic.
So after Xmas it was time to push them properly and after multiple calls and basically annoying the shite out of them we finally have installation planned for Thursday / Friday at original cost.
I wouldn't mind but I really want to get this job done. It will pretty much zero our electricity bills for the year and pay for itself in a few years.
We are running at about $1800 a year for electricity and prices keep going up so it should pay for itself in less than five years after claiming our grant back from the government.
They have a 30 year guarantee so over the lifetime of the panels it could save us over €45K making it a no brainer really and it could also move us into a cheaper bracket for our mortgage as they go on energy efficiency as a pricing point now too.
I'm excited to get this job over the line this week and start making those savings.
It all helps and will be one less bill coming out of our account every week and another step towards reducing our monthly outgoings enough to step back from work a bit more.
I will update when it gets installed and running. I know that winter isn't the best time to get going but they will be set for the spring when it really makes a difference and then and excess energy generated will be credited to our bill for next winter to keep the cost at a minimum.
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