I have been a techno-nerd ever since I made a crystal set (primitive radio)
in my first year at grammar school and spent my pocket money on a soldering
iron. Skip forward nearly 70 years and I live amid too much technology and a
hidden pile of obsolete ‘junk’. (My first amplifier lasted 30 years but I have had three since 2006.)
As such my electricity consumption has always been on the high side, seven or
eight hundred watts of stuff simply idling away and that is not something easily
afforded any more. At current prices it translates to about £200 a month.
Four years ago I looked into the economics of storage batteries to be
charged by solar energy and what used to be called Economy 7. The installer
told me how much money I could expect to save and I pointed out that even if my
electricity bill reduced to zero it would take eleven years to get the money back
and that was the end of that.
Since then the mismanagement of UK power supplies by successive idiotic
governments resulted in mid-2022 forecasts that energy costs for the average household could reach £5,000 or even £7,000 a year.
On that basis the battery payback period might, for me and maybe with a degree of optimism, reduce to under three years.
With a lot of people having similar ideas, batteries were not easy to source but I
found a supplier who claimed to have 50 in stock. I put my requirements in
writing and he quoted a price for three batteries plus installation. The installation costs were on the high side but the batteries were
relatively inexpensive and actually available. Except that proved to be untrue.
One was delivered nearly four weeks after payment and another about a month
after that. No one came to install a two battery system as would have been
possible and boxes of new equipment stacked in the garage proved to be too much
of a temptation for yours truly. I installed the system myself.
Despite the contractor claiming to have previously installed more than 400 battery systems
for satisfied customers I came to believe he had never done one before. Last month
the third battery was supplied and under threat of action through the Small
Claims Court a fourth was provided free of charge in compensation for the
failure to install them to the contracted timetable.
My handiwork has been inspected by a qualified electrician who said it was the
neatest battery installation he had ever seen which will be down to me taking more than a
month to do it and not rushing it through in a day as a professional would do.
However all is not entirely well. The batteries charge when they should and discharge as demanded by the household
load but I do not understand all the settings available
to the Inverter and it is obvious I am not getting the best out of the system.
There have been something like ten broken appointments by the company’s alleged
expert including last Thursday and yesterday. I think the next move will be to
offer £1,000 to anyone who can successfully set the system up properly and allow
me to control it from my phone. Then go back to the Small Claims Court.
The good news (?) is that the price of batteries has jumped up since I bought mine
in August and four currently retail for more money than I paid for the whole installation plus inverter.
But are they saving any money?
Definitely. All my electricity is now bought at the cheap overnight rate. My
consumption so far today has been 16 kilowatt hours and it won’t go up any more
because the batteries will take the load. Preceding days’ consumption has been 36, 36, 8, 7, 27, 30, 15 and 7 kilowatt
hours, the wide variation being dependent on whether I charged the car or was not at home.
Thanks to the foul weather the solar panels have produced almost nothing.
182 kilowatts at a little over 11 pence per kilowatt hour (overnight rate) compared with the capped
rate of 34 pence translates to a £40 saving in nine days (the extent of the
Smart Meter’s history) and well over £100 a month. At the price I paid for the
system the payback period based on those nine days will be less than four years. In practice longer because
Christmas has seen more car use.
But to a techno-nerd the outlay has provided a degree of
techno-fun.
Notes: As you can see my energy supplier has been slow to recognise the economies made.
The batteries are 3·5 kilowatt hour units and four is more than enough to keep the house
running all day.
I am still using my 69 year old soldering iron.
Current Wars is a 2017 movie with some scenes filmed in Belvedere’s Crossness sewage works.