Anyone Have Solar Panels On Their Roof?

[Truman42]

My wife and I are moving into a rented property ina few eeks time and it has solar panels on the roof, two lots of four. How does this all work with regards to the rebate you get for feeding power back into the grid. (Which I know your technically not doing)

I phoned an energy broker who got us signed up with AGL which offered the best deal. But he said that according to the records the house didnt have a solar power enabled meter that allowed them to monitor the solar usage or whatever.
But the house is brand new only built a few months back. Surely the builder would have put on of these meters in if he went to the trouble of installing solar panels at the same time?

Also the broker said AGL give us a 8 cent PKW buy back and the government give us a further 60 cents PKW buy back. However were only paying 17c PKW after a 10% discount.
So how do we work out how much kws the solar panels will produce on a nice sunny day?

 

[Northside Novice]

My wife and I are moving into a rented property ina few eeks time and it has solar panels on the roof, two lots of four. How does this all work with regards to the rebate you get for feeding power back into the grid. (Which I know your technically not doing)

I phoned an energy broker who got us signed up with AGL which offered the best deal. But he said that according to the records the house didnt have a solar power enabled meter that allowed them to monitor the solar usage or whatever.
But the house is brand new only built a few months back. Surely the builder would have put on of these meters in if he went to the trouble of installing solar panels at the same time?

Also the broker said AGL give us a 8 cent PKW buy back and the government give us a further 60 cents PKW buy back. However were only paying 17c PKW after a 10% discount.
So how do we work out how much kws the solar panels will produce on a nice sunny day?

in qld energex has to install the new meter , your house maybe on the install waiting list. we had to wait about 3 months .

there should be an inverter next to the meter box which should have a small screen which tells you how many kw the system is generating at any given time . so just check the screen on a nice sunny day .

even if your not selling power back to the grid you will still be reducing mains power bill slightly. befor our new meter we had the magnectic spinning dail type meter. the dial spun backwards all day and only spun fowards at night so in a sense we had free power during the day and paid at night. but it all depends on how much power you use .

we averaged $300 a quarter befor solar and now $150 after selling back to grid using a 2kw system.

 

[Maheel]

maybe the owner will be getting the creds not you....
you might save a few bucks during the day if you get to use the generated power during the day ?

i was talking to an installer up the road the other day and he said that's what a few landlord's were doing with some installing big 10KW systems

most of the power generated was during the day when your not there to use it, owner also gets to depreciate the asset and claim any install incentive.
at night when we get home and crank up the usage there is no benefit

i got NFI but

 

[felten]

Our PV inverter box has a readout that displays the KWhs produced for the day. And the digital meter has a 'total KWh generation' readout as well which you can scroll to and compare the two.

I'm not sure how the rebate works, but I know we had to wait a few weeks for someone to come around and enable something on the meter so they could monitor the power.

 

[Murcluf]

There was an article in the Adelaide Advertiser in the last week regarding the rebate, in a nutshell it said the to rebate is only payable to the original owner of that particular house who signed up. For example if you have panels on your house and you sell it, the new owners don't get the rebate. if you sold the house and took the panels and put them on your new house, you still don't get the rebate. As a rental if the owner is the one who put the panels on and the power bill is in his/her name then they'd get the rebate. If the bill is in the tenants name and the tenant changes and the name on the bill changes to the address then you wont get the rebate. So if you want to keep getting the rebate you have to keep living in the house you had the panels put on.

Things may be different in other states so I think it would be best to check with authorities on this

 

[TidalPete]

Ditto to what Northside Novice said.
What happens up here is that we get credits for our excess Kw's when the meter is read. After the account comes in we ring the electricity supplier to get the credits converted into cash which is transferred into our bank account about 10 days later.

TP

 

[Truman42]

So am I right in saying that the owner of the house will get the governments 60c pkw rebate but I should still get AGL's 6 c pkw rebate as the bill is in my name?

The RE asked me to let them know when we chose a supplier so she could let the owner know and I wondered why he needed to know and what it mattered to him.
I told her that the energy broker had said the correct meter wasnt being shown on their system at the house and she said the owner was going to get onto Tru energy about it? What have they got to do with it if were going with AGL?

 

[Truman42]

Oh and anyone know roughly what 8 panels will produce per hour on a nice sunny day? 4 of them face North and the other 4 face West.

 

[TidalPete]

So am I right in saying that the owner of the house will get the governments 60c pkw rebate but I should still get AGL's 6 c pkw rebate as the bill is in my name?

Have no idea Truman. Perhaps a talk with the landlord will help to sort things out?

Oh and anyone know roughly what 8 panels will produce per hour on a nice sunny day? 4 of them face North and the other 4 face West.

There are different panels that produce different results & different size panels as well. To confuse things further, some panels are better on cloudy, rainy days than others. What sort of solar panels do you have?
Have a look at this LINK.

TP

 

[Truman42]

Have no idea Truman. Perhaps a talk with the landlord will help to sort things out?

There are different panels that produce different results & different size panels as well. To confuse things further, some panels are better on cloudy, rainy days than others. What sort of solar panels do you have?
Have a look at this LINK.

TP

Thanks mate will do.

 

[SpillsMostOfIt]

There's a couple of home brewers on this forum, but mainly people experienced in solar and other alt.energy systems:

http://forums.energymatters.com.au/

The feed-in tariffs differ from state to state. Almost every system will differ due to the technology of the controller, the type of panels, the way the guy wired them in together, the amount of shading on your panels, the pitch of your roof and the breed of your dog.

It's a lot like home brewing, but with a different pay-off.

 

[Truman42]

There's a couple of home brewers on this forum, but mainly people experienced in solar and other alt.energy systems:

http://forums.energymatters.com.au/

The feed-in tariffs differ from state to state. Almost every system will differ due to the technology of the controller, the type of panels, the way the guy wired them in together, the amount of shading on your panels, the pitch of your roof and the breed of your dog.

It's a lot like home brewing, but with a different pay-off.

Damn thats our problem, we have a cat not a dog....thanks for clearing that up...

 

[Truman42]

There's a couple of home brewers on this forum, but mainly people experienced in solar and other alt.energy systems:

http://forums.energymatters.com.au/

The feed-in tariffs differ from state to state. Almost every system will differ due to the technology of the controller, the type of panels, the way the guy wired them in together, the amount of shading on your panels, the pitch of your roof and the breed of your dog.

It's a lot like home brewing, but with a different pay-off.

Ohh and thanks heaps for the link.

 

[Tseay]

Thanks TP and SMO- I am trying to understand whether solar panels are worth it or not (house already has solar hot water). The links will be a great help.

Cheers

 

[wynnum1]

You have to have contract to connect to grid before you install once too many in an area installed they stop new connections because the network can not cope and you need smart meter to connect and that can increase your charges in peak times .Also a lot of systems are not big enough to get in credit so will never get the high price .

 

[outbreak]

Thanks TP and SMO- I am trying to understand whether solar panels are worth it or not (house already has solar hot water). The links will be a great help.

Cheers

Try and make some changes to your house to make it thermally efficient first. When you replace appliances get efficient ones. There are a lot of things to do before going solar. On average your biggest energy uses would be heating/cooling and water heating.

 

[Parks]

So am I right in saying that the owner of the house will get the governments 60c pkw rebate but I should still get AGL's 6 c pkw rebate as the bill is in my name?

I definitely would expect the owner to get the 60c, if not all of it - he has to recoup the costs of buying the solar system.

 

[Aces High]

I work for a wholesale company in the solar industry myself.

Your system sounds like a 1.5kw system, so with your base load power you will probably exporting next to nothing back to the grid anyway. What will happen is that the system is producing power during the day and this will offset the power your using and mean that your energy bill will be cheaper overall.

If like the rest of us brewers you're running 2, 3, 4 fridges, then your base load power use could potentially be close to 1kw/hour or more anyway. You've got a system that at its peak is producing 1.5kw/hour in daylight hours so this solar system is really just going to reduce your overall power bill

 

[Leigh]

In Victoria, only the first 100MW of roof top solar gets the Gov credit, to complicate that further, similar to SA, if you move you lose the rebate and the next person on the waiting list gets the rebate (not the new occupant of the house).

Sounds to me like a 1.5kW system, but with an interesteing conficguration. The north facing panels will produce peak power between 1-3pm-ish, the west between 4-6pm-ish maening you won't actually ever be producing a peak for the system...

Victorias feed in tariffs also operate completely differently to every other state in Australia, so do your homework based on the regulations we have in place. While most of the information above is accurate for the particular state where the AHBer lives, it don't work like that here

 

[QldKev]

Not directly helping the OP questions about rebates, etc But still some great info.

This is a brewer up here who has setup a huge system
http://www.tigereye.net.au/solar.html