Good price on 260watt panels.

[Jev88]

I wouldn't normally promote flEbay but this looks great?

 

[ericroy]

Only if you have a controller able to handle that voltage....

 

[tonyidle]

There are some really good deals around domestic PV panels at the moment. I bought a 250W around a year ago for £114. You do need a fair bit of roof to install one though.

 

[chaser]

Looking for another panel , but are these made for houses , would they stand up to slight flexing, just asking maybe someone will know

 

[tonyidle]

Only if you have a controller able to handle that voltage....

Plenty do - but you're right you do need to bear it in mind when choosing one.

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[chaser]

Sorry cross posted the last two, as I thought

 

[tonyidle]

Looking for another panel , but are these made for houses , would they stand up to slight flexing, just asking maybe someone will know

Construction is no different to any other rigid panel.

 

[Ivory55]

With the solar electric roof thing being done away with I wondered if you fitted your own and run it to an emersion heater in the hot water tank at home would it still be viable thing to do.

 

[BwB]

Looking for another panel , but are these made for houses , would they stand up to slight flexing, just asking maybe someone will know

Should think these will be ok on a motorhome. I've had two on mine for 5 years and they are still going strong.

 

[TerryL]

With the solar electric roof thing being done away with I wondered if you fitted your own and run it to an emersion heater in the hot water tank at home would it still be viable thing to do.

Last year I re-arranged the way we heat water to use the solar panels to heat the water during the middle of the day i.e. when they produced maximum power. Seemed to be reasonably economical, although they were of course "topped up" by the normal electricity supply.
However last week I decided to experiment and went back to heating the water by gas - on all the time as we've got an ancient system that won't take a timer (although we're currently looking to change that). As we have an energy monitor it was quite easy to judge the effects and we found it was actually cheaper to run the water heating on gas.

Now to your question. Our panels (6) put out 1.4Kw maximum, as recorded the last few days and over about 2 hours mid-day. Our immersion heater is a 3Kw model so I would guess powering purely by solar panels would work, though not very well, but you would need to install at least 10 panels and frankly the cost just wouldn't be worth it. You'd never get your investment back.

As an aside, we were fortunate to get the panels installed before the Government reduced the Feed-In-Tariff and we've benefited ever since - our annual energy bill is less than £300 - so I've calculated we'll get our money back in 10-12 years. Only wish we'd gone for more panels but our advisor didn't think the extra cost was worthwhile at that time - can't just add panels now or we'd lose the FIT.

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[MisterB]

4kw system on our roof at home. We are in the lower tariff though at around 22p. Still produces @ £900 per year though!

As for solar heating for water, you can get panels that are specific for water heating

 

[Ivory55]

I didn’t know if they did something like a 1kw emersion heater at the bottom of the tank, a bit like the old economy 7 when it had a bottom heater for at night.

 

[tonyidle]

We're on the earlier subsidy/FIT and have been for over 10 years. We have the max panels allowed (16) and they're probably the best investment we've ever made. As well as the making money they have cut our power bill by around 30%. There are devices that sense when not all power is being used by the home they're attached to that will turn on an immersion or other appliance. At the moment though we're happy with what we're getting.

 

[autorouter]

There are devices that sense when not all power is being used by the home they're attached to that will turn on an immersion or other appliance.

Another alternative, especially if you don't have a hot water tank but have a 'combi boiler' that heats the water on demand. A 'heat battery' uses solar electricity to heat a solid/liquid that melts at about 80 degrees C. It is very well insulated, so it loses heat very slowly - a small fraction over 24 hours.

The idea is, the cold water is piped through the heat battery, and then into the combi boiler. If the water is already hot enough, the thermostat senses this, and the boiler doesn't even switch on. If it's warm but not hot enough, the boiler switches on and heats it up just enough to make it the right temperature.

So basically it's cutting down the amount of gas needed for hot water. If there's no sun, the combi boiler functions as normal.

 

[Minxy]

Last year I re-arranged the way we heat water to use the solar panels to heat the water during the middle of the day i.e. when they produced maximum power. Seemed to be reasonably economical, although they were of course "topped up" by the normal electricity supply.
However last week I decided to experiment and went back to heating the water by gas - on all the time as we've got an ancient system that won't take a timer (although we're currently looking to change that). As we have an energy monitor it was quite easy to judge the effects and we found it was actually cheaper to run the water heating on gas.

Now to your question. Our panels (6) put out 1.4Kw maximum, as recorded the last few days and over about 2 hours mid-day. Our immersion heater is a 3Kw model so I would guess powering purely by solar panels would work, though not very well, but you would need to install at least 10 panels and frankly the cost just wouldn't be worth it. You'd never get your investment back.

As an aside, we were fortunate to get the panels installed before the Government reduced the Feed-In-Tariff and we've benefited ever since - our annual energy bill is less than £300 - so I've calculated we'll get our money back in 10-12 years. Only wish we'd gone for more panels but our advisor didn't think the extra cost was worthwhile at that time - can't just add panels now or we'd lose the FIT.

Could you not fit some extra panels just for your own use and leave the existing ones feeding into the FIT?

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[TerryL]

Could you not fit some extra panels just for your own use and leave the existing ones feeding into the FIT?

Well I suppose it's possible but as the whole system is set up to feed into the electricity supply it would take a bit of trickery to keep additional panels separate and still get some benefit. It would also probably negate the terms and conditions that I have to confirm every time I claim FIT. Not worth it IMO but thanks for the thought.

 

[Wh05apk]

We have an immersun, which diverts excess solar to the emersion heater, but only feeds excess, wether it's 20w or 2kw, works brilliantly, for the whole summer the water tank is normally heated by late morning.

 

[Campervan_man]

As a MOBILE Motorhome and Caravan Mobile Engineer based in Flintshire I fit 260W panels to Motorhomes and Caravans. They are Jetion or Jinko, sized 95CMS by 165CMS PLUS the white RV white plastic feet X 6. Unfortunately as I fitted an Avtex Snipe3 in the middle of My Dethleffs M'home roof I didn't have room to fit one on My own van, had to fit an 100W instead.