Wednesday 4 February 2009

Going solar!

Finally we managed to make a list of companies that do solar installations.

The list consists of 5 companies (so far) and they were all contacted today. One has already replied and set a date for a quote. Woohoo! I'm getting excited. It has been our dream for quite some time now to go solar.

We have been reading up heaps to make ourselves as knowledgeable as possible. But I am sure when the day comes we will probably still be overwhelmed by all the information.

Now, if anybody has any advice, suggestions, words of wisdom, own experience (good or bad), etc. please do not hesitate to share it with us. We will appreciate any feedback from you all.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

We did ours through the Solar Shop in St.
Peters. Their sales rep did a very thorough
job of going around with us and working out
how much power we were using and how many
panels we needed (we ended up getting 32 -
as many as we could afford and could fit on
the roof). It took a while to get them
installed, though - we paid the deposit in
August and didn't get them installed until
the beginning of November (but we were also
away for a month during that time). That was
when Little Johnny had just increased the
rebate and I suspect they were getting more
business than they could handle. It might be
different now. There was bit of a stuff up
with the actual installation - they didn't
bring all the panels the first time so we had
to wait several days for them to finish -
but other than that there were no dramas.

My main complaint was that we were told very
little about how the system actually worked
or what the little numbers on the inverter
screen mean (the electrician who did the
final check enlightened us). Not much of a
service manual either, just a couple of
really technical tomes (one in German - i
read some German but not enough for that -
obviously you wouldn't have that problem!).

That said, we've had no problems so far and
if we did. their after sales service seems to
be good - some friends of our who live on
the Yorke Peninsula bought a system from
them and when something went wrong they drove
from Adelaide to fix it.

It's certainly worth it - we got our latest
power bill today and we were $150 in credit!

Veggie Gnome said...

Thank you so much, Barbara, for your in-depth comment!

We had our solar hot water installed by the Solar Shop. Same experience as yours. Pretty good, but we weren't told anything about the system itself, how it works, dos and don'ts. Not that there are many, but...

Ps.: The comments are moderated so they don't show up until I get them sent per email and approve them. So I left out your repeat - as I realised that there must have been a hiccup. Thank you very much for taking the time for writing about your experience. :)

Unknown said...

Hi VG, I had Solar PV installed in Sept 2007. It has been the best investment I have ever made. If you haven't read it already, here is a post about the entire installation experience.

Gav

Anonymous said...

No advice or hints just GREEN with envy. Good on you looking forward to hearing more

Pip said...

Yes, envious, would love to put solar power in, but realistically we can't afford the cost. However we can afford solar hot water and will be installing that this year.
Pip