This is a topic ive been meaning to address for some time. It’s something which customers ignorant of how important a highly knowledge and skilled designer to a successful solar pv installation, rarely ask about a great deal. After all, so much of the marketing they get bombarded with on TV or via the internet, very purposively seeks to portray solar panel installation as a generic nsort of commodity, boasting of so many budget panels offered at a headlong grabbing price (which inevitably rises steeply with every extra requirement and undisclosed, yet unavoidable charges). And they do this with good reason, from their own selfish and greedy perspective.
Of course they want you to believe that. They want you to think that their representative with a couple of days training at conference centre somewhere, can design systems as well as well as the real specialist with 20 years industry experience, trade qualifications as long as your arm, and maybe a thousand systems designs already under their belt, and they want you to think that the only important thing about your Solar PV installation is the number of panels. Of course they do.
The situation, in reality, is very different. The knowledge, skill, as well as the integrity of your solar pv system is designer is without doubt the single most important factor determine how much bang for your buck a given solar panel installation will give you.
Taking a real example from recently, we sold a job recently to a customer which had seen an offer from one of the large utility providers, who were marketing Solar PV installations undertaken by subcontractors from around the country, for around the same price they were offering, except theirs had 2 extra panels (although cheaper, less efficient, and less powerful ones (530W vs 460W), and a much smaller battery (5kwh to our 12kwh).
The system the national firm was offering -let’s just call them Squid Energy- was a strictly off the shelf system, with no scope for substituting the offer kit, for more appropriate equipment given the situation. The customers hme was a standard semi-detached house, approx 6m across, with a straight up and over the roof sloping North-South.
The Squid system was comprised of 12 X 460 watt panels, a small battery and the other necessary components. Of course, the was only room for 10 of these on the favourable south elevation, and so if the customer wanted them to fit the other 2 modules, they’d have to pay to scaffold the North side also, and unless they were then going to cover that side, they’d end up paying an absolute ton extra (because anything additional to the base system is going to grotesquely over-charged), just for 2 utterly inconsequential panels on the much less productive North side -which aside from being totally cost ineffective, would look really odd to boot, as though the 2 modules were just stuck on as an after-thought, which really, they would have been.
Basically, they’d have had 4.6 instead of 5.3kwp installed on the south side, losing about 800kwh a year by a conservative estimate, for the sake of a pointless 300 or so on the other, all whilst adding thousands of pounds to the installation costs and making the front of their house look really odd. In addition to this, the substantially larger battery we were offering would have saved them approximately 300 pounds a year more than the battery Squid were offering, and also, Squid would have charged for the additional equipment required to fit the job which was revealed on survey, including a £250 bill to National Grid for a part which was required by law that they had to fit, but which we chose not to pass onto the customer.
In the end, despite Squid’s ultra low offer price, by the time all their surcharges were tallied up, our system ended up not only costing less overall in the absolutely sense, but was substantially better also in terms of the price per watt, and miles better in terms of payback, to say nothing about the overall bang for buck of the system, which with ours had returns on the Solar PV installation nearly a third greater than with Squid Energy.
Now of course, we dont mind people trying to haggle! We understand that they want the trustworthiness and expertise of the firm who’s been doing it literally decades, for the price of the cheapest, most desperate and inexperienced firm that they come across. But we´re always the best value for money when you consider our package as a whole – knowledge, experience, design skills, quality of equipment, quality of workmanship, strength & duration of guarantees, aftercare, and price- and when we explained why this was to our customer they had good sense enough to be able to recognise it.
What we haven´t talked about in this article are system demanding more complicated designs, and very briefly, this is why: because customers who are aware that the solar PV installation they require is going to involve a bit more than fitting 2 rows of panels in portrait configuration, they all tend to choose Ecotekk anyway, as its obviously much easier for them to understand the importance of a highly skilled and experienced designer, whereas often just a five minute chat with the likes of Squid Energy reveals the inadequacy of their system designers for the task. The more complicated the job, the more routinely we get given the order. It goes without saying though, that if we can undertake relatively complex design challenges and produce objectively superior solutions to whatever over Solar PV installation firms are offering, we can consistently produce superior designs for more straight forward jobs also. These in turn lead to thousands of pounds of worth of Solar PV investment returns, above what that custopmer would have recieved if theyd gone with an inferior Solar panel installer.
Ive been meaning tio write on this subject for a while. But we´re already 1000 words in and i havent even scratched the surfaced in term of covering the full scope of this crucial topic.
We´ve (brifely) dealt with why, even for customers in seemingly easy to design properties in terms of solar panel installation, would benefit immenself from choosing a skilled and experienced system designer – a real specialist- rather than chancing it to some electrician who´s just come off a solar course, or a trainee sales representative from the likes of Squid Energy.
There are so many important aspects of Solar PV system design left to cover, including the appearance of the array, the stringing, shade mitigation, retrofitting to existing systems, complex designs, Emergency Power Supply, and much, much more. Its now apparent however, that what I had intended as a comprehensive post on the subject, will have to be broken down into a series of posts, dealing with various aspects in turn.
In the meantime, the most imnportant take-away, is that no matter what advise you´ve been given by other solar panel installers, speak to us before making any purchasing decisions. We´ve never seen a system designed by another Solar PV installer that we couldnt have improved on, and time and time again we see eggregious examples of customers being given bad information and advice.
Call Ecotekk today and speak to the realk Solar PV experts.
Part II coming soon.