Battery Vehicle Society

While out and about in Crawley West Sussex today I spotted this house



Thats 15 PV panels of I recon 120watts or there abouts and a large water panel as well.

Anyone here we know ?

ChrisB

Wow, that's a lot of panels!

Mary.

We need to see a lot more homes looking like this one if we are going to reduce our dependancy on fossil fuels! (And charge up all our EV's).

Jan

I reckon they are there to save on retiling the roof

Looking at the asthetics of that install, it's a bit roppy IMO

I fully support renewables but it looks untidy with the gaps etc.

Solar tiles might have been better, and blended it in with the adjacent property.

To encourage good uptake it needs to look good, blend in as best as possible, perform well and be affordable. Quite a challenge

Totally agree Peter. My house has slate tiles and I'm located in a LLLI (that's an area of landscape preservation) so there's litle liklihood of that sort of thing being granted permission here particularly looking like that. However if the cells looked like slate tiles.............

retepsnikrep wrote:Looking at the asthetics of that install, it's a bit roppy IMO

I fully support renewables but it looks untidy with the gaps etc.

Solar tiles might have been better, and blended it in with the adjacent property.

To encourage good uptake it needs to look good, blend in as best as possible, perform well and be affordable. Quite a challenge

TBH I think it needs to be cheap for it to have a good uptake.

I suspect the PV install itself would have cost upwards of 15K solar tile root would have been even more expensive

Most folks will only take up this sort of thing if they can see they are saving money and at 15K its not worth it, would take 20 or so years to pay for it, may be less depending on fuel prices, folk dont want to wait 20yrs to see a return on their money, they have important things like 100" LCD tv's they have to buy you know

Its like electric vehicles who wants to drive something thats slower, wont go as far on one fill and cost twice the price or 1/3 as much again

Not when they go out and buy a weisel that will do 60mpg for next to nothing that can be re-filled in 3 mins and will travel 500miles on a tank.

90% of joe public dont give a monkeys about the planet, yeah they all whaffle on about how much recycling they do and other such green stuff, but ask them to actually put their hand in their pockets suddenly they dissappear into the wood work to watch their 100" plasma

TBH I wouldn drive my Blingo if it hadnt have been as cheap to buy as it was and the fact its free tax does 60miles for £1. I dont mind living with its oddness and lack of range. But if we suddenly start to get taxed on it and other such nasties are introduced it wont be worth hanging on to any longer

See I'm one of those 90% but I'm quite happy to say it

ChrisB

Yep I agree again. I'm not a tree huggy person me but I do know that burning hydrocarbons that took millions of years to bury under the ground and belching them out into the atmosphere in just under 100 years isn't doing us a lot of good.

What would be good though is to have roofs that do more than simply shed water off a house, and when you look at the cost of a new roof that 15/20k isn't quite so outrageous. I live in Rural Dorset where around 40% of the houses round me are thatched. I did consider buying one myself. The average thatch needs attention every 10 to 15 years and really the best you will get out of one is 20 years when you're then looking at typically £15 to rethatch.

So a roof that generates fuel for £20k isn't quite so bad out here. Though you could say a thatch can do that but it is rather a disaster when they go up in smoke.

Having a roof and a car which will get me around for free now that really does interest me very much, see I'm on the same train as Chris is really

qdos wrote:Yep I agree again. I'm not a tree huggy person me but I do know that burning hydrocarbons that took millions of years to bury under the ground and belching them out into the atmosphere in just under 100 years isn't doing us a lot of good..........

In my book nature does quite a good job of doing this without any help from the little people, yeah the chances are the little people might be speeding it up a tadge but the little people are still arguing as to if they are actually making that much difference to the whole nine yards, but thats a whole new subject for debate I recon

ChrisB

my bungalow has got 18 x 210 watt sanyo pv panels, a 800 amp hour 48 volt surrett battery bank an 8kw studer inverter and on a good sunny day is off grid and independant. it has taken me two years to research and fit myself, I imported parts from all over the world. hot water is provided by 40 glass tubes feeding a solar hot water cylinder and has given all our hot water since march a log burner in the lounge heats most of our home. and i run around in my berlingo electrique soon i shall retire and put my feet up

Terry Roberts