So, you’re looking to buy solar panels, and possibly battery storage. If you’ve just put your details into a site offering you to “compare prices between local installers”, then you’re probably going to be inundated with phone calls over the next day or two.
Here are 6 pieces of advice that I would wish to know if I were in your shoes:
- The best return on investment is usually found by putting as many panels on the roof as you can. By the time you’ve paid for labour, project management, scaffolding, inverter and battery, the price of the actual panels is comparatively low, so it’s usually a good idea to cover all of the unshaded roof space. Sometimes, it even makes sense to put them on a north-facing roof too.
- The workmanship warranty is the most important one. You can have a 30-year product warranty on a solar panel, but if it fails, are you really going to deal with the solar panel company directly? Are you able to return the panel to them, swap it for a new one and replace it in your system? The same can be asked of your inverter and battery storage.
Some companies offer a workmanship warranty that’s as short as two years. One problem with this is that there are, for example, ways to fix solar panels to slate roofs that will probably be watertight for around 2-5 years, but I wouldn’t recommend them. We certainly don’t do them. Having a longer workmanship warranty means that the company is motivated to install long-term solutions that will stand the test of time. It also lengthens the usable length of the warranties of all of the hardware.
Ideally, you want the warranty to be insurance-backed too, so that you’re still covered if the company goes out of business.
- Are they MCS accredited? If you want to be paid to export electricity that you don’t use, then they need to be. And if so, are they a member of RECC, which came out of the Office of Fair Trading, and which MCS prefer, or are they a member of HIES, which was set up to meet the needs of installers who wanted their oversight to be a little more flexible? For example, if you’re talking to an RECC member, then they’re explicitly forbidden from signing a customer on the dotted line at the first visit, which I personally think is a good thing for a significant investment. This isn’t true if they’re a member of HIES.
If someone tries to push you into signing a contract while they’re there, please just say no. There is never a genuine good reason why you can’t sleep on it and give them an answer the next day.
- Size the battery wisely. The battery is the most expensive part of a system, so having an oversized battery is costly. That said, having the right sized battery, and thinking about future proofing it, is crucial to make the best use of your solar energy and get the best ROI, and it’s not unusual for someone to wish that they had a bigger battery. There’s a lot more detail to this that I’ll go into now, but make sure that your system designer has a good reason for offering the battery size they suggest.
- Pay for the deposit on a credit card. Even if you only pay £100 deposit on a credit card, that means the entire cost of the install is covered under section 75 protection, which means that if the company you’re dealing with doesn’t supply you with the goods and services that they’ve described, or they go bust, then the credit card provider is “jointly and severally liable” for any breach of contract or misrepresentation.
- If you can, pay for the system up front. If you need a loan, don’t get it from the installer. Some installers will offer you the chance to pay on finance, and try and make this sound appealing, but this will almost always be on more than 10% APR, most commonly around 12%. If you shop around and get a loan from a bank, you could get that down to 6.1%. If you pay £10k for a system over 10 years, you’ll pay an extra £3,500 over the life of the loan on the higher rate.
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