What are you all up to

I had solar panels installed on both my south and west facing roofs with storage battery. I am hoping 9 months of the year we will be self sufficient and while we are away we will collect money from selling the surplus back to the grid. Every little helps.

peedee

I mentioned this some time ago InaD.  Both our cars are insured with NFU and I had a cracked windscreen a couple of months ago. Phone call to our local NFU office - put through straightaway to Nationwide Glass who attended at our camp site at 0800 the following morning and replaced the windscreen within the hour.( I could have been waiting for up to a week for the other lot to turn up!) All I had to do was pay the £50 excess over the phone to NG - and that was it.  No forms to fill in - no hassle - couldn't have been easier.

The guy from NG was telling me that NFU customers get priority because NFU are a big contract for them and they get paid within a couple of days.  He did mention another very well known internet insurer who are dreadful at paying and it often takes them months to get their money.

So - it's not just about how much the premium is.

Yup we put solar panels on our East and West roofs, unfortunately nothing south facing suitable, did this 10 years ago, no battery but probably the best investment we have made, be interesting to see how you get on during the winter months, we are only generating on average 4kw per day just now and we are using most of that during the day so not sure how we would charge a battery if we had one, during the summer months we generate average 25kw so a big differance.

The way our contract runs it does not matter whether we are home or not we get paid on how much we generate and i give our supplier a meter reading every 3 months from this they make a percentage  assessment on how much we put back into the grid and pay us additionally for this, but they have no way today of metering how much we push back into the grid.

Same with us we have 15 panels on 2 south facing roofs and our average annual return is £1800 tax free

I have often thought about solar panels but I am not convinced at our age we would get the investment back? Probably should have done it back in 2008 when FIT payments were introduced by Gordon Brown and were at their most generous. I understand the price of panels has fallen since but probably risen again due to the Ukraine invasion. 

Whilst the general energy subsidies are not as generous as last years us pensioners are still getting £500 between us which for us probably pays for a month and a half at peak use time so not to be sniffed at. Unfortunately still a long way from the time when energy bills were around a £1000 a year!

David

Wow!!! you must be on one of the early contracts that pays out a lot of money per kw, we are currently only getting approx 18p per kw, but i know early contracts were in the region of 50p per kw, we get a return of approx £800, our bungalow is south facing but the apex is west/east we have 16 panels but it works ok.

I think we probably fitted ours when the FIT was at its highest, in  late 2011, I think, after that it started falling.  Prices of panels were also high then.  Break even time was 11 years, so we are in profit now.

 These days we get about 70p per kWh when the 50% deemed export is included.  Trying to work out whether it would be better to move to actual export now we have a smart meter.  I think our FIT payments in the last 12 months came to well over £2k.

 Being over 80 now, I will get £350 winter fuel and OH gets £250, so £600 total due to the pensioner payments.  That plus our FIT payment should hopefully cover the fuel bills.

It gets  a lot worse when you hit 80 Steve!!    Some companies will not even quote for an over 80.

We were with NFU way back, for a couple of years, but the renewal suddenly shot up, so we reluctantly went elsewhere.

Cars are up for renewal late October, plus one road tax ,and one service,  house is 1st January, plus the other road tax, and caravan in mid March, plus service, other car service is late August, so little respite from  major bills any time of year!

More or less completed the new socket installation for DD today, just need to tidy up some of the wiring done before she bought the house.  Really filthy under the floor there, but at least there is good headroom.  The other, newer, end of the house is much cleaner under the floor, but much less headroom.

Callum got all dressed up in his overalls when he got back from a friends birthday party, and insisted on exploring under the floor with Mummy, so he was pretty filthy when he emerged.

  Mummy has discovered that lots of her pipes under there are not insulated, and neither is a lot of the floor, so she is keen to remedy that.  There is a lot of junk under there too, looks like the remains of an old warm air heating system.  Plus lots of redundant pipes and wiring........quite a mess!

Just a couple of points about the CL should you choose to stop here, Goldie.

The Wi-Fi is free and very good, at least as far a pitch 3, half way across the site from the arial. The drinking water is below the site by the track into the site and so it is an uphill pull of about  75 m to get the pitch we are on.

Not quite  as fine as it was forecasted yesterday but thankfully we had very little rain. After doing a round of washing we drove up west side of the R Ribble as far as Helwith Bridge where we had a walk up Long Lane towards Pen-y-Ghent. After lunch we had a further short walk at Langcliffe.

Today's photo is of a footbridge over Rathmell Beck, a short walk from the site.