Solar PV - thoughts and experience anyone?

Unless you are totally pigeon free have the panels netted. Local to us, Hereford, did not and had to have the panels removed the wiring cleaned of deposits within one year on installation. Apart from the smell there was considerable fire risk a pigeon droppings were around cables and they were thermally insulating the cables. The cost of the work was over £ 2,000. Friends in London had a similar problem. Even if your supplier will not net have them leave the scaffolding and have somebody else do it.

If you have an electric hot water cylinder then have a

www.121energy.com/marlec-solar-iboost-free-hot-water-from-solar-pv.html?gclid=CjwKEAjwlZa9BRCw7cS66eTxlCkSJAC-ddmw3uGG0y6IzCBgPDXhstV2w6Ba398h1xfjJ9vQ2WIA_BoCXTXw_wcB

or similar price should be much less than quoted if part of an install.

Other than that I believe the figures for savings are understated. We are looking at payback on our two year old system at about 4 years.

Talk to a neighbour who has had the system installed as typically they will be one £ 100 cash back for anybody who signs up as result of their recommendation.

I'm told that the transformer for each panel needs replacing at +/- 5 year intervals - which the salesmen don't mention?

Its taken me three reads of that to realise that you dont have a murderous vendetta against the homeless. My brain has given up for the day

Invertors rather than Transformers  - We have a ten year warranty on ours and believe the replacement cost to be under £ 1,000. They are also solid state

We paid £ 5,000 for a 16 panel 4 Kilovolt system two year ago. Friends paid about £ 11,000 for a similar system seven years ago and it is still going strong with no decline in performance.

I have PM

Used EvoEnergy, very professional organisation operating to Quality standards.  Quoted well, installed well, unit (touch wood) never been a problem (5 years), they advised that the control unit needs replacing every 10 years and sold us a very cheap extended warranty to cover out to 20 years.

If you use them and mention my name... (I am prepared to negotiate)

NB FITS goes down, but so does the capital costs, the income is index linked...

You'll need scafolding as part of the deal, so get your chimneys painted at same time etc.

I think you will find that with many companies in this sector, one near me who I dealt with who had in excess of 600 employees, all were laid off at the beginning of this year. There was suggestion they would start back up in May/June this year, but it hasn't happened.

And yet the renewable feed-in tariffs only started a month before that ex-chancellor took over, six years ago (and the Renewable Heat Initiative was introduced 18mo in to that tenure). If Osborne had really wanted to squish 'em, that would have been the time.

Seems to me that the real reason they've been cut is precisely because the installation costs have fallen so much - the break-even has stayed somewhere around the same, which is the whole point of subsidising developing technologies, isn't it? They should never have been allowed to be seen as a nice little investment for the comfortably-off.

Many of the "free install" roof-lease schemes collapsed because the potential customers realised they were a bit of a scam, rather than because of changing legislation.