Transcript
We often hear a lot of myths about solar power and what it does and what it doesn’t do. So in this video, we’re just going to run through the most common three or four myths that we often hear and give you some answers to help you with that.
The top four that we hear the most are that, solar is too expensive, solar will run my home during a blackout, solar won’t saved me money because I’m at work all day and solar doesn’t actually have any environmental benefit. So I’m just going to talk about each of those quickly.
Firstly, solar is too expensive. Well, a decent solar system starts somewhere around $6,000 to $8,000 and goes up from there to whatever you want to spend. Now, that may be a lot of money but the thing we need to remember is that in general terms, solar will save you every year for 30 years around 25 to even 40% of what you spent in the first place. That’s a massive return, especially compared to what you might get on a term deposit or anything else you might do with your money.
Also, solar will run my home during a blackout. Well, it will, if you have a battery and a smart solar system but that gets a lot more expensive as well. So, solar by itself will today not run your home.
Now, the reason for this, is, in a blackout, the grid goes down. If your solar system is operating and feeding power back out to the grid, it could electrocute the poor guy working down at the substation. So it just shuts itself down in a blackout. If you add a battery, we can isolate it so the battery can then run your home during the blackout and the solar system can keep charging the battery.
The third thing we hear is that solar won’t save me money because I’m never at home during the day. Well, there’s a little bit of truth to that but it’s not entirely true.
Firstly, there’s stuff always on at home, whether it’s pool pumps or refrigerators or anything, there’s always stuff running during the day. The other thing is that, if you’re not at home, you’re exporting your excess solar power and you do get paid somewhere between a third and a half of what you buy that power back for at night.
So if you export two kilowatt hours during the day, you pretty much get one free one at night. So it’s not like it’s not worthwhile, it’s just not quite the same calculation as if you are at home all day.
The fourth thing we hear is that, solar panels, the process of manufacturing them is so environmentally bad that there’s really no environmental benefit with solar power. We hear this a bit and we will agree with that with some of these cheap solar systems that only last three to five years, that is definitely true but if you do buy a good quality, well manufactured system that’s going to last 25 or 30 years, it delivers massive environmental benefits, much more than pretty much anything else we can do as individuals.
So I hope this has helped. Please give us a call or fill in a form if you would like any more information on any of the above.
