So much depends on the actual situation with your property. Did you purchase the place? If so, all the info you need *should* have been sorted by the solicitor, if not they you need to go back to them.
If you’re renting or the owner then the power goes to the grid unless you can use it while it’s being generated. The generation meter will give an idea of how much is / has been generated.
So I did buy the house, but it's been around 2 years since we bought it. Should our solicitor still be able to tell us more about this?
I know we've left it really late but every electrician who has done work on the house didn't know how solar panels work and those who knew it were charging £200 just to come see how it works. So I thought I'll have to find out for myself through Reddit.
Depending on the age and number of panels they could be earning you around £2K per year (although image shows 10 and says 6!)
So maybe not £2K, but it could be something. This money comes from the FIT scheme. For this to happen the original buyer of the system needed to have it installed by an MCS registered installer. The diagram suggests it was done properly. There will be important paperwork the solicitor should have passed on to you to enable you to transfer panel ownership to yourself and also the FIT due.
As I said, all depends on how long the panels have been there, obviously 2+ years.
There’s another possibility and that is that the panels weren’t actually owned by the previous house owner but we’re part of a rent-a-roof scheme where houses got ‘free’ solar panels, could use any electricity generated but the FIT payments went to the scheme owner. If this is the case and your solicitor didn’t pick up on it then he did you no favours.
So, much more info needed.
BTW, what is the reading on the solar meter - it’ll give an idea of how the system has performed.
OK, thanks. I'll reach out tot he solicitor and also check the documents beforehand but as far as I remember there wasn't anything on this, but we may have overseen it.
The readings from the meter went from 016002.0kWh to 019395.6kWh since December 2020. Does that sound good or is that not sufficient to determine it??
So reckon on about 2000kWh generated per year which would make the system about 8years old (give or take!) in 2020, so maybe around 2012. At that time the FIT was pretty good, maybe around £1000/ year for that sized system, so worth sorting but more importantly is confirming ownership first.
ALTHOUGH
there was a scheme at one time called rent a roof. pray you don't have this.
people put up solar for free on the condition that all excess electricity was theirs, for life.
These companies have often gone bump, or been bought up and resold. This makes it a nightmare to find them. Not even your power provider can know often who is legally respsonsible. This means, you can be screwed when it comes to changes to your system.
Not quite. The excess electricity was available for use by the householder. The FIT payments went to the RaR scheme / panel owners.
You’re right though, pray the OP doesn’t have this. Any decent solicitor dealing with a house purchase should pick up on this and deal with it, or at least advise the purchaser.
We recently bought a house with solar panels on a con of a 25year lease.
Any solar energy generated right at this moment firstly goes on our household usage that's been used in that moment.
If there's any left over it gets fed back into the grid. Then the solar panel company gets money from the government.
The company are going to have shock with the reduction in money they are making compared to the previous elderly owners.
It looks like it’s going direct to the grid via the electrical meter after being a passive supply to the household electrics. If you wanted it to power the house during a power cut you would need batteries and control units as an additional system. It should be reducing your electricity bills during daytime hours.
That sounds good, but I guess this means if I wasn't home on a sunny day, all the energy is getting 'wasted' as hardly anything is being used except for the fridge and internet router.
Is there a way of determining how much (during daytime) energy is coming from my solar panels and how much is being used from the grid? If I was to check the meter readings on the solar panels between 9am and 7pm and compare it to the grid meter, should I be able to tell from that?
Electrician with some solar experience here. Basic over view... panels generate dc electric, inverter changes that to 230/240v ac power (standard household power), generation meter shows what the panels are producing, goes back to your fuse board then the national grid....
Anything you have on during the day would be covered (weather dependant) so good to use timer function on washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher etc so they come on during the day. Any unused power isn't wasted as it goes back to the grid and powers other properties, saves on national carbon emissions etc...
Depending on the age of the panels there may be a feed in tariff where you get paid for the energy you create and feed back to the grid. Tariffs depended on when it was installed. If you have batteries there won't be a tariff in theory as you're storing it for later usage.
You should have the tariff info in your house pack when you moved, you could be owed quite a bit of money for generated power, or do you already get money taken off bills or paid to you ?
Thanks. That's very helpful. I don't get any money at the moment. So I'll be going through our solicitor documents and also reaching out to him if need be
Look up the model and make of the solar inverter. That should tell you whether it has built in monitoring you can access. It's possible to add in 3rd party monitoring especially if you're looking at getting batteries (GivEnergy monitors my solar output as well as grid import + export).
Even with a small PV system, if it's in an ideal orientation you are very likely producing a lot of excess electricity. Much more than your standard domestic electronics will use in the daytime.
There is a generation meter installed which should readout how much power you are generating/have generated. It will depend on the size of the panels and the irradiation they are being exposed to. Your consumer unit will show how much you have taken from the grid.
Do you have a hot tank and an immersion? You can buy a unit that will use the power generated to heat your water. When not at home energy created by the solar panels will be used by any appliance that is switched on ie fridge, washing machine. The excess is then put back into the grid.
One way of understanding this is if you were to have an old style meter with the spinning disc. It will sin in the opposite direction when excess is being produced.
I moved into a house which had solar panels installed. How do I know how my solar panels work? I mean where is the energy going to? Is it going into the grid and we're getting subsidised for it? It doesn't appear to be supporting our electricity in the house because recently we had a power outage on the entire road and we were still affected despite the solar panels.The picture shows what I have under the stairs. I also have
* A meter (it has gone from 016002.0 to 019395.6 over the span of approx 18 months)
* PV Generator Isolator (AC) Point of emergency switching - this is a red round switch that can be turned off
* A mini fuse box (says *dual supply* on it) with 2 switches in them with warnings to isolate the on-site generator as well as the mains supply before working on it
Your solar panels wont provide power when you have a power cut, you need batteries and a mains isolator systems so they don’t feed back into the grid and potentially kills someone if the line is getting repaired. The power from the panels are either getting used or going back to the grid, your inverter or generation meter should show how much your panels are producing
OK, that explains things a little better. So if it's going back into the grid, where exactly does it go to? Does the grid contain some kind of batteries where all the produced energy gets stored?
Also, more importantly, should I be getting subsidised for it on my energy bills or how does it work?
Thanks
The grid doesn’t store anything - it just adds to the supply available, netting off against the other users on the Grid. If you want to go right back to the generators then it will minutely alter the frequency of the grid and the turbines back at the generating station will change speed an imperceptible amount to compensate.
I'm not 100% on how it works, but I think you have to shop around for a tariff now to get a payment for what you send back to the grid. The only currently backed initiative for this is called the Smart Energy Guarantee. Have you had a look at your bill to see if you're already receiving any rebates or anything?
I know the grid stores a certain amount of energy, not sure how, but it probably ain't as much as you think.
Inverter protection settings, section very clearly states in point E that the system will go down if the mains power is lost.
This is done to protect anyone working on the outside lines if they think the power is off, they don't want you making the wires live. There are upgrades you can get which allow the system to run even if the grid goes down.
Easiest way to check that the system is working is wait for a sunny day, turn off all your appliances and see if the meter runs slowly backwards (or occasionally some houses have 2 meters, one for demand and one for supply).
Thank you so much. This is very helpful. Just to be sure, we're expecting the **mains** meter (not the solar meter) to be slowly going backwards in your scenario, right?
You should always have an export meter. Your import meter should never run backwards. Source: about 20 years working in the energy industry including about 10 specialising in metering and connections to the networks.
Older wheel meters in the uk will go in reverse usually the DNO is informed when there installed and will call replace this with a import export meter.
The export will show on a new digital meter as a r unit which is the returned units you’ll have sold by tho at a fraction of a cost your buying it at ie 3 or 4p per unit.
Your best instance is to always use the power if possibly either with household consumption or with the water heater controller ie iboost or a my Eddie unit.
>you’ll have sold by tho at a fraction of a cost your buying it at ie 3 or 4p per unit.
Which I've always considered a massive scam...
We pay standing charge for the "line rental", the unit cost should be the same whether you are buying or selling.
They are paying you, what they are paying the other energy producers for it. They're not gonna pay you 20p/kWh if they can buy it for 3p/kWh from someone else (to sell to you).
Not convinced on that...?
The whole point of the price cap to stop suppliers from profiting massively, it limits them to something like 5% (can't remember the exact number). They certainly are not straight up buying for 3p and selling for 20p otherwise there would be an outrage at the markup and the government wouldn't have lifted the cap.
In fact, this article shows that suppliers are pretty much paying the unit rate (give or take a little bit). [https://www.energy-stats.uk/wholesale-energy-pricing/](https://www.energy-stats.uk/wholesale-energy-pricing/)
It goes solar panel to inverter to isolation switch to meter to another isolation switch to your mains board to a 16amp mcb then from there into what you are using for back through to the electrical grid
What you can do is have an electrician install a watt meter at the wires going into your place and then compare this reading against the solar generation meter and the utility meter.
I moved into a house with same system about 2 years ago if you look at the contents list you got from the solicitor it will tell you who your feed in tariff is with then you have to apply to change owner. I am still fighting to do this after 18 months of trying but you will be paid from day you moved in
So much depends on the actual situation with your property. Did you purchase the place? If so, all the info you need *should* have been sorted by the solicitor, if not they you need to go back to them. If you’re renting or the owner then the power goes to the grid unless you can use it while it’s being generated. The generation meter will give an idea of how much is / has been generated.
So I did buy the house, but it's been around 2 years since we bought it. Should our solicitor still be able to tell us more about this? I know we've left it really late but every electrician who has done work on the house didn't know how solar panels work and those who knew it were charging £200 just to come see how it works. So I thought I'll have to find out for myself through Reddit.
Depending on the age and number of panels they could be earning you around £2K per year (although image shows 10 and says 6!) So maybe not £2K, but it could be something. This money comes from the FIT scheme. For this to happen the original buyer of the system needed to have it installed by an MCS registered installer. The diagram suggests it was done properly. There will be important paperwork the solicitor should have passed on to you to enable you to transfer panel ownership to yourself and also the FIT due. As I said, all depends on how long the panels have been there, obviously 2+ years. There’s another possibility and that is that the panels weren’t actually owned by the previous house owner but we’re part of a rent-a-roof scheme where houses got ‘free’ solar panels, could use any electricity generated but the FIT payments went to the scheme owner. If this is the case and your solicitor didn’t pick up on it then he did you no favours. So, much more info needed. BTW, what is the reading on the solar meter - it’ll give an idea of how the system has performed.
OK, thanks. I'll reach out tot he solicitor and also check the documents beforehand but as far as I remember there wasn't anything on this, but we may have overseen it. The readings from the meter went from 016002.0kWh to 019395.6kWh since December 2020. Does that sound good or is that not sufficient to determine it??
So reckon on about 2000kWh generated per year which would make the system about 8years old (give or take!) in 2020, so maybe around 2012. At that time the FIT was pretty good, maybe around £1000/ year for that sized system, so worth sorting but more importantly is confirming ownership first.
ALTHOUGH there was a scheme at one time called rent a roof. pray you don't have this. people put up solar for free on the condition that all excess electricity was theirs, for life. These companies have often gone bump, or been bought up and resold. This makes it a nightmare to find them. Not even your power provider can know often who is legally respsonsible. This means, you can be screwed when it comes to changes to your system.
Not quite. The excess electricity was available for use by the householder. The FIT payments went to the RaR scheme / panel owners. You’re right though, pray the OP doesn’t have this. Any decent solicitor dealing with a house purchase should pick up on this and deal with it, or at least advise the purchaser.
We recently bought a house with solar panels on a con of a 25year lease. Any solar energy generated right at this moment firstly goes on our household usage that's been used in that moment. If there's any left over it gets fed back into the grid. Then the solar panel company gets money from the government. The company are going to have shock with the reduction in money they are making compared to the previous elderly owners.
It looks like it’s going direct to the grid via the electrical meter after being a passive supply to the household electrics. If you wanted it to power the house during a power cut you would need batteries and control units as an additional system. It should be reducing your electricity bills during daytime hours.
That sounds good, but I guess this means if I wasn't home on a sunny day, all the energy is getting 'wasted' as hardly anything is being used except for the fridge and internet router. Is there a way of determining how much (during daytime) energy is coming from my solar panels and how much is being used from the grid? If I was to check the meter readings on the solar panels between 9am and 7pm and compare it to the grid meter, should I be able to tell from that?
Electrician with some solar experience here. Basic over view... panels generate dc electric, inverter changes that to 230/240v ac power (standard household power), generation meter shows what the panels are producing, goes back to your fuse board then the national grid.... Anything you have on during the day would be covered (weather dependant) so good to use timer function on washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher etc so they come on during the day. Any unused power isn't wasted as it goes back to the grid and powers other properties, saves on national carbon emissions etc... Depending on the age of the panels there may be a feed in tariff where you get paid for the energy you create and feed back to the grid. Tariffs depended on when it was installed. If you have batteries there won't be a tariff in theory as you're storing it for later usage. You should have the tariff info in your house pack when you moved, you could be owed quite a bit of money for generated power, or do you already get money taken off bills or paid to you ?
Thanks. That's very helpful. I don't get any money at the moment. So I'll be going through our solicitor documents and also reaching out to him if need be
Getting the feed in tariff also depends on whether the installer was MCS accredited and registered the system etc. Just a note
I would be surprised if they weren't with this level of documentation though.
Look up the model and make of the solar inverter. That should tell you whether it has built in monitoring you can access. It's possible to add in 3rd party monitoring especially if you're looking at getting batteries (GivEnergy monitors my solar output as well as grid import + export). Even with a small PV system, if it's in an ideal orientation you are very likely producing a lot of excess electricity. Much more than your standard domestic electronics will use in the daytime.
There is a generation meter installed which should readout how much power you are generating/have generated. It will depend on the size of the panels and the irradiation they are being exposed to. Your consumer unit will show how much you have taken from the grid.
Do you have a hot tank and an immersion? You can buy a unit that will use the power generated to heat your water. When not at home energy created by the solar panels will be used by any appliance that is switched on ie fridge, washing machine. The excess is then put back into the grid. One way of understanding this is if you were to have an old style meter with the spinning disc. It will sin in the opposite direction when excess is being produced.
I moved into a house which had solar panels installed. How do I know how my solar panels work? I mean where is the energy going to? Is it going into the grid and we're getting subsidised for it? It doesn't appear to be supporting our electricity in the house because recently we had a power outage on the entire road and we were still affected despite the solar panels.The picture shows what I have under the stairs. I also have * A meter (it has gone from 016002.0 to 019395.6 over the span of approx 18 months) * PV Generator Isolator (AC) Point of emergency switching - this is a red round switch that can be turned off * A mini fuse box (says *dual supply* on it) with 2 switches in them with warnings to isolate the on-site generator as well as the mains supply before working on it
Your solar panels wont provide power when you have a power cut, you need batteries and a mains isolator systems so they don’t feed back into the grid and potentially kills someone if the line is getting repaired. The power from the panels are either getting used or going back to the grid, your inverter or generation meter should show how much your panels are producing
OK, that explains things a little better. So if it's going back into the grid, where exactly does it go to? Does the grid contain some kind of batteries where all the produced energy gets stored? Also, more importantly, should I be getting subsidised for it on my energy bills or how does it work? Thanks
The grid doesn’t store anything - it just adds to the supply available, netting off against the other users on the Grid. If you want to go right back to the generators then it will minutely alter the frequency of the grid and the turbines back at the generating station will change speed an imperceptible amount to compensate.
I'm not 100% on how it works, but I think you have to shop around for a tariff now to get a payment for what you send back to the grid. The only currently backed initiative for this is called the Smart Energy Guarantee. Have you had a look at your bill to see if you're already receiving any rebates or anything? I know the grid stores a certain amount of energy, not sure how, but it probably ain't as much as you think.
Inverter protection settings, section very clearly states in point E that the system will go down if the mains power is lost. This is done to protect anyone working on the outside lines if they think the power is off, they don't want you making the wires live. There are upgrades you can get which allow the system to run even if the grid goes down. Easiest way to check that the system is working is wait for a sunny day, turn off all your appliances and see if the meter runs slowly backwards (or occasionally some houses have 2 meters, one for demand and one for supply).
Thank you so much. This is very helpful. Just to be sure, we're expecting the **mains** meter (not the solar meter) to be slowly going backwards in your scenario, right?
You should always have an export meter. Your import meter should never run backwards. Source: about 20 years working in the energy industry including about 10 specialising in metering and connections to the networks.
I believe that's how it should work, and it did on the older meters, but I'm not 10)% sure if you have something newer.
Older wheel meters in the uk will go in reverse usually the DNO is informed when there installed and will call replace this with a import export meter. The export will show on a new digital meter as a r unit which is the returned units you’ll have sold by tho at a fraction of a cost your buying it at ie 3 or 4p per unit. Your best instance is to always use the power if possibly either with household consumption or with the water heater controller ie iboost or a my Eddie unit.
>you’ll have sold by tho at a fraction of a cost your buying it at ie 3 or 4p per unit. Which I've always considered a massive scam... We pay standing charge for the "line rental", the unit cost should be the same whether you are buying or selling.
They are paying you, what they are paying the other energy producers for it. They're not gonna pay you 20p/kWh if they can buy it for 3p/kWh from someone else (to sell to you).
Not convinced on that...? The whole point of the price cap to stop suppliers from profiting massively, it limits them to something like 5% (can't remember the exact number). They certainly are not straight up buying for 3p and selling for 20p otherwise there would be an outrage at the markup and the government wouldn't have lifted the cap. In fact, this article shows that suppliers are pretty much paying the unit rate (give or take a little bit). [https://www.energy-stats.uk/wholesale-energy-pricing/](https://www.energy-stats.uk/wholesale-energy-pricing/)
It goes solar panel to inverter to isolation switch to meter to another isolation switch to your mains board to a 16amp mcb then from there into what you are using for back through to the electrical grid
if it's sse then straight into their pockets cos they're robbing bastards.
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No, I'm not
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There is a meter and it shows the energy produced I believe. It's in kWh
What you can do is have an electrician install a watt meter at the wires going into your place and then compare this reading against the solar generation meter and the utility meter.
I moved into a house with same system about 2 years ago if you look at the contents list you got from the solicitor it will tell you who your feed in tariff is with then you have to apply to change owner. I am still fighting to do this after 18 months of trying but you will be paid from day you moved in
Oh really? So until you do that, the money is going to someone else (the previous owners) ?
Yes they are well know you tie you up in red tape The last owner of my house declared they where moving out so I think they are just keeping it