How important is it to size and design a solar power system to your specific usage patterns?
Synopsis
The size of your solar power system is a crucial aspect to consider. You need to size the system according to your current and future usage, keeping in mind that changes and evolutions are inevitable. You must consider aspects like battery storage and self-consumption. It is crucial to have excess generation to cover future usage, including the expected rise in electric vehicles.
Most places offer a feed-in tariff for the excess generation from your solar system. This feed-in tariff will create a credit that can offset your evening consumption or daily charges. A site assessment is conducted for every sale to understand the consumption profile, home design, free space, and other factors to determine the right size of the solar power system.
Video Transcript
The design aspect is extremely important. Having a completely oversized system, just for the sake of going big or go home also makes as much sense as going too small. Size the system according to your usage and future usage. Understand that there's going to be changes and evolutions as it goes. Things like taking battery and self-consumption is a must. Things like electric vehicles, electric vehicles are not that far down the track. Within a few years, your next vehicle is likely to be an electric vehicle or a hybrid. So having excess generation or at least enough to cover that future usage will make sense now and into the future.
For the moment, the majority of places are able to have a feed-in tariff. That feed-in tariff is any excess generation that occurs from your system. When it goes back into the grid, it will create a certain credit, which could be whatever amount is set by your retailer. That credit can then start to offset some of your evening consumption while the sun is not shining, or towards your daily charges of just the fact of being connected to the grid.
We'd say that we probably do a site assessment to almost all our sales. We have a face-to-face meeting with the end user. So it'll generally be the mum and dad, the young couple, the retired couple, the family, the single homeowner. Whichever it is, we have the site meeting, not just to put a face to the customer, we have a site meeting to understand what their consumption profile is, what their home looks like, what the complexities of the home, the designs are, how much free space there is, whether they use, whether they've got a swimming pool and whether they've got heating for the swimming pool.
So there's a lot of variables that make up the decision, what size you should have. It's not just, You've got a roof, here's the size, voila, thank you very much let's move on. There's a lot of factors that need to, we need to get from the end user to match the size and then they'll end up with exactly what their expectations should be. Slapping just a general random size, let's go with a 6.6 kilowatt just because that's the stock that I have and that's the inverter that I'm trying to flog off is wrong. It just doesn't make sense.