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Common Questions about Solar and IWCE

What should be installed first, the solar meter or the panels and inverter?

Your holy grail is to have a solar-compatible digital meter in place by the time your solar panels and inverter are installed so that your solar installer can turn on the new system as soon as it’s completed.

But for a range of reasons, it’s not always possible to time things to perfection. Most residents in the Inner West still have old-style rotary meters – the ones with the shiny metal disk spinning in the middle – so if you have made a decision to go solar, first decide whether you are staying with your existing power supplier. Some companies, such as Powershop, currently provide a free solar meter for all customers with no strings attached.

Once you’ve decided who will be your electricity company, tell them you’re going solar and that you want a “solar-compatible meter”. Then you can hope it’ll be installed by the time your solar system goes in.

Some households who have been changed to a digital meter in the past year have found they still need a new meter to go solar. You will need to talk to your electricity company about this.

What are the steps to getting a solar system installed, from inquiry to generation?

These are the steps if you use Inner West Community Energy for help and advice. First, we will send you our Customer Data Form, which asks you about your household, contact details, your energy use, and if you have any firm requests for the type of solar PV system you want. This gets all the information together in one place to save everyone time.

You send that to us. If something’s not clear, we’ll ring and ask you. Then we will send it to one of our preferred solar installers. He’ll review it and ring you to set up a time for a visit to your house. We insist on our installers always looking at the house before quoting; some solar companies don’t bother. Then, the installer will email you and us his quote. We’ll read it and speak to the installer if we have questions. We’ll email you our thoughts on his quote.

You then decide if you want to proceed. Note that the contract is between you and the installer, not us. If you agree to go ahead, the installer will be on site typically in 4-6 weeks. Some installers require a deposit upon acceptance of the proposal.

If you have the right electricity meter (see above: What should be installed first, the solar meter or panels and inverter?) you can be generating your own power the next day. We can also will give you a hand ensuring your system joins the Inner West Community Energy fleet on Solar Analytics, which we recommend.

What resources should an installer have?

The  installers are qualified electricians and we only work with solar installers who are accredited with the Clean Energy Council’s solar accreditation process (http://www.solaraccreditation.com.au). Our installers head a team of three: with another electrician and an apprentice. Sometimes there may be a fourth member of the team.

What is a realistic time frame for getting solar installed?

As you can read from our answer above (What are the steps to getting a solar system from inquiry to electricity generation?) there are quite a few steps involved, and some of the timing will be dependent on your availability and speed of decision making. But from the time our installer is invited on to the roof of your house to system completion is typically one to three months.

How long does installation take?

Again, there are variables involved in answering this question. Assuming perfect weather (no dew on the roof in the morning, no rain all day, no strong winds) normally a good sized system can be installed from start to finish in one day. Sometimes our installers will install a small system in the morning and make a start on another system in the afternoon, then return the next day to complete it.

How many panels for a 5kw system?

It depends on what type of panels are used but typically it will be about 18. A 5 kilowatt system is quite a big system for the Inner West.

Can you access two storey houses?

Yes. Our installers have long ladders and safety equipment.

What are micro inverters?

Inverters convert the DC electricity of solar panels into the AC electricity that matches the power of the grid that we all use. In a conventional system, one inverter is used to convert all the output of the PV cells into AC power but one shortcoming of these inverters is that if one or two panels are shaded by say a tree, the output of the whole system will be adversely affected. With microinverters this does not happen. On the other hand microinverters are a little more expensive. At Inner West Community Energy most people have used conventional inverters but a few have paid more to get the microinverters because their roof is at times shaded by trees and/or chimneys.

 

What is Inner West Community Energy's relationship to its preferred installers?

Our installers pay us a ‘Finder’s Fee’ of 4% of the full price paid by the customer. This payment goes towards building our group, running solar information events, reimbursing our project manager for his time, publishing relevant support materials and from time to time helping fund solar installations on local community buildings.

 

Can we run the house just on solar without batteries? We want to be able to run the house on solar when the grid goes down.?

No, you can’t run the system without batteries. The inverter needs the grid to stay active. Batteries are needed to ensure power supply matches demand if you’re not on the grid.

 

is it better to oversize the PV system, to have one bigger than you currently need?

Yes. Always install as much PV as you can afford because in a few years you’ll have batteries, you may disconnect all gas appliances and you may have an electric car. In our experience, nobody ever regrets putting on too big a system, only that they installed too small a one!

It’s best to more-or-less match the PV system size to the inverter, although some people put in more PV than the inverter can manage. This is called oversizing and because of the efficiency performance of most inverters when running below 100% capacity, we think this makes a lot of sense. Most of the time your inverter will not be at capacity so oversizing will cut your annual efficiency losses a little. You can discuss this with your installer.

 

is it better to have the panels flat or tilted?

If you consider that the ideal tilt for solar in the Inner West is 30 degrees to the north, then having panels flat on a flat roof will cut performance to 87 percent; ie if the tilted panels produced 100 kilowatt hours per year, the flat ones would produce 87 kwh. While tilt frames do cost a little more, perhaps $200 to $500, having panels tilted not only improves performance, it also means that the panels will be kept cleaner when it rains. Also tilted panels stay cooler which is preferable as performance declines when panels get hot. We also reckon that panels tilted to the sun look cooler too!

Do you deal with batteries?

Yes, we can help with battery purchase and storage advice. Mostly, our members have not installed batteries yet because they seem too expensive and people would prefer to invest as much money as they have into solar for now. We agree with this approach in principle, but look forward to helping anyone who wants to do batteries as well as solar.

Is there the opportunity for community purchases ie bulk buying?

For now, Inner West Community Energy is not able to generate enough sales volumes to drive down prices through bulk buying as the volumes required for this are huge. However when we compare the prices our members are paying for solar to the industry benchmarks, we feel we are already delivering top quality systems for a competitive price. Hopefully we can gear up for bulk buys in the future.

Is the structure of a regular roof strong enough to support a solar system?

Yes, but quite a few Inner West metal rooves are old and rusty so in those cases the roof will need to be replaced before solar is installed. Almost certainly we would not install solar on a heritage slate roof either as there is too much risk of expensive damage to the slate. But many older Inner West homes with slate rooves on the original building have a modern extension at the back with a Colorbond roof that’s perfect for solar.

On a sunny day in Sydney how much energy can I expect to generate?

You can Google this to get lots of typical general figures, but here are some real numbers from our monitoring through Solar Analytics. One of our Annandale households has a 3.3kw system and on January 1, 2018, a sunny mid-summer day, it generated 8.8kw.

What are the heritage issues to consider when designing a solar system

Generally, Inner West Council has no problem with solar as long as you do not install a system facing the street if you live in a heritage or conservation area. We are seeking some standard advice on this but if you have any doubts, call the council planning department. In our experience, they are very helpful.

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