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Equipment and buying decisions
Inverters, warranties, batteries, and how to read a quote closely enough to tell whether it has modelled your house or a generic one.
How to read a solar quote and spot an oversized system
A solar quote is a proposal with an embedded forecast, and the forecast rests on assumptions that are rarely written down. Six checks separate a quote that has modelled your house from one that has modelled a generic one and attached your address.
Read the guide- BuyingMicroinverters or a string inverter: when each one winsThe argument is usually had about shading, which is the smaller half of it. The larger half is that one device is warranted for the life of the panels and the other is warranted for about half of it, and a replacement is a scaffolding job.9 min
- BuyingWhat a 25-year solar warranty actually coversA solar installation carries at least four separate warranties from at least three different parties, and they expire at different times. The 25-year figure on the front of the brochure is usually the one that pays out least.9 min
- BuyingWhether you need a home battery, by consumption profileA battery earns the gap between what you pay for a unit and what you are paid for one. That makes the deciding question how much electricity you use after dark, not how much your panels generate at noon.10 min
- BuyingHome battery lifespan: rated cycles against real cyclesBatteries are sold on cycle counts running into the thousands. A solar-charged battery in Britain gets nowhere near that many in a decade, which means the cycle rating is almost never the thing that ends its life. The warranty term is.9 min
- Straight answersWhen a home battery is not worth buyingHome battery payback in the UK depends on your consumption, your export rate and the installed cost per kWh. Here are the three cases where solar battery storage does not recover its cost inside its warranty, and how to tell if yours is one of them.8 min