Today is an anniversary. Our rooftop solar power setup was installed on this day nine years ago. When the system was first installed I had two concerns, about the inverter and about the panels themselves.
Inverter
The biggest concern was about the inverter. I expected that this would have a limited life because an inverter is inevitably a box of power electronics which has to work quite hard. Power supplies, especially in my experience switched mode supplies, can be quite unreliable after a few years. I've fixed quite a few of them in the past, and switched mode supplies can be quite tedious to work on. An inverter is like a large switched mode power supply which works in reverse so I didn't have huge expectations for longevity and sadly the inverter has actually failed twice, first in 2018 and then in 2020. In both cases it was quite simple to fix and because I know which end of a soldering iron to hold onto I did that myself.
Panels
The other concern was the less well known longevity of the solar panels. There are two main ways in which solar panels degrade. The first is due to corrosion should they become damp and the second due to the sun light falling on the panels degrading them. I've had solar panels on homes that I lived in since the mid 1980s, starting with several 30 cm x 30 cm panels which I used to charge batteries. Those panels were not sealed from the weather so they got damp, there was visible corrosion in some places, and their output dropped markedly over time. But around the turn of the century I bought a 12 V sealed panel to replace them. I still have that on my garage roof and it's output is still close to the specification so I hoped that the panels for the roof be similarly long lasting.
The guarantee said that the output of the rooftop panels would still be at 90% of the initial level after 10 years of use. I realised soon after the panels were installed that their peak output was significantly higher than it the specification suggested. The rated peak output for the installation was 3760 W and the installers suggested that we'd probably not see more than about 3600 W because of the angle of our roof. But within a few days I was seeing ~3990 W. I had some concerns at that time that perhaps there had been a little slight of hand on the part of the manufacturer, who perhaps under specified the panels in order to protect themselves from guarantee claims. i.e. Perhaps we'd see the panels degrade by more than 10% over ten years but that they'd still be within 10% of 3760 W or even within 10% of 3600 W in ten years time, meaning that a loss of almost 20% of output would be possible without being able to claim on the guarantee. But this has not turned out to be the case at all. There is no degradation. I can happily report that the observed peaks last summer were still around 3990 W. What's more, we're not quite at ten years yet, but the total output from the system also seems not to have dropped even slightly. After the first three years passed I noted that the system had generated 10200 kWh in total. Six years further on the total is almost exactly three times this, at 30556 kWh. What's more, if not for the inverter glitch in 2018 which costs us about 250 kWh of output, we'd actually be ahead of the first three years by now.
Graph of output over time
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| The orange line shows our excess production over time. It goes up in summer and down in winter, and by March we just about break even which is why the last part looks flat. When the panels were installed we had teenage children at home and our consumption was similar to our rate of generation. You can tell how long ago our children left home from this graph (some lower power appliances also made a difference). The glitch three summers ago was caused by the inverter failing and my taking a few days to fix it. The second failure was a year ago in February and lost only one day's winter output so that isn't visible on the graph. |
When the panels were installed I estimated that it'd take about ten years for them to pay for themselves. Because electricity prices change, we've changed our electricity meter once and supplier more than once, it's quite difficult to work out exactly where we are now so far as the return on investment is concerned. However it's quite easy to make an approximate calculation so that's what I'll do. I know that we'd generated 30442kWh up to the end of March, and of that we'd consumed 27767 kWh and exported 2589 kWh. Electricity costs us just under 20c per kWh so we've saved about €5300 from our electricity bill. With our current tariff we get pretty much the same for what we export so that's worth about €500. This leaves us with about €5800 of our original €8000 investment returned, and at the same rate the system will have paid for itself in about 13-14 years after installation. This is about the same result as I came to about three years ago. Just four or five more years to wait, then.
Note that in reality over a whole year we use about 40% of our own generation directly from the panels and export the rest of what we produce. The electricity company doesn't bill based on this, though, so for a purely financial calculation we don't need to take that into account.
Conclusion
I'm happy with the system. The inverter fault was disappointing and the manufacturer's response even more so, but I fixed that. The panels are faultless. Solar panels with lower performance were much more expensive when I first started experimenting with them in the 1980s but when we installed this system it was clear that they'd pay back within a reasonable amount of time. They're now not far from half the price that they were then so someone considering installation these days can expect to see their money back very quickly indeed.
