To install one solar panel on the roof of a 3-bedroomed suburban semi costs between £6,000 and £8,000. This can be used for heating water, and is expected to save about 60% of your fuel bills. Evidence suggests it will add about £5,000 to the value of your home, as well as saving money in the long term.
The solar energy companies don’t want you to know this, though. Not unless you’re prepared to sit through a couple of hours of sales spiel [while your toddler plays up by throwing things around the room and climbing on the furniture; but who can blame him when he's being completely ignored for such a long time?]. And yet it is pointless to tell them when they call to make the appointment, that all you want to know is how much it costs, because you know you definitely want to buy it, it’s just a question of whether or not you can afford to buy it now. They won’t tell you. They want you to hear the spiel.
So it’s a bit unreasonable of the salesman to look so sulky when you tell him you can’t possibly afford it. Not even if they do give us £25 for every appointment we manage to get them once it is installed.
He was one mega-sulky dude.
£6-8k? That is rather depressing. And a lot more than I guesstimated when I was ruminating about how solar water heating could be made more affordable.
JOOI, was there any breakdown of how they reached that figure? I thought the “parts” would only come to around £2k, so that’s a lot of labour on top of that.
I suppose it’s difficult to price something when there are so many variables involved – and you don’t want to scare people off with a high top-end ballpark figure if they’d fall at the bottom, or upset potential customers at the higher-end because you’d given them a low-end ballpark figure – but you’d have thought they could size up the house fairly easily once they’d arrived and then just say “here are the options, it’d be about £X but depending on factors Y and Z could cost £Q more”.
Well done for getting that far though – we didn’t manage as much as that when investigating it for my house in Cambridge (although a lot of that was due to our imminent departure and so the tenants being the only ones who’d benefit economically).
Pssst…..http://www.solartwin.com/installation.php
You think that’s bad … never ever look into getting your soffits replaced. How we ever got that woman out of our house I will never know. (Funnily enough, the price kept dropping while we tried to get her out too).
Mother Earth News is full of good ideas about alternative energy!
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Green-Homes/2007-10-01/Build-Your-Own-Solar-Water-Heater.aspx
Good luck!