Posts By Ronald Brakels, Author & Fact-Checker At SolarQuotes

Solar Hot Water Diverters Beat Batteries On Energy Storage

August 22, 2017 2024-10-02T12:16:40 by 74 Comments
battery vs hot water cylinder

If you want to store your solar energy, should you put it in a battery or in your hot water cylinder?

 

Update: Compare all the hot water diverters available in Australia here.

How A Diverter Can Give You Solar Hot Water And Store Energy At A Lower Cost Than Batteries

A solar hot water diverter is an electronic device that sends surplus electricity from your rooftop solar to your electric hot water cylinder.  This reduces, or even eliminates, the need to use grid electricity to heat water.  Under the right circumstances diverters can save you money and allow you to store energy at a cost lower than batteries.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Hot Water

The Solar Spectrum And Why “UV Solar Panels” Are A Con Job

August 17, 2017 2023-11-13T12:31:53 by 28 Comments
rainbow power company

We are getting reports of people paying through the nose for 5kW of “UV Solar Panels” from fast talking salespeople. Paying more for “UV Panels” is about as sensible as buying rainbow powered panels from a leprechaun.

The sun is a very large, naturally occurring, fusion reactor in the sky.

It constantly releases a vast amount of energy.  Even by the standards of sky fusion reactors it’s pretty powerful and outshines at least 90% of the stars out there. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Panels Tagged With:

How To Use a Fronius Smart Meter To Solar Power Your Hot Water

August 15, 2017 2024-10-02T12:55:41 by 86 Comments
fronius hot water diversion

Note to installers: Don’t wire directly in to bathtub or the duck will die.

Over the past week or so I’ve been politely prodded  by a plethora of people pushing me to provide information pertaining to solar hot water diverters.

A ‘hot water diverter’ is a box of power electronics that that sucks up your homes’ surplus solar electricity and diverts it to an electric hot water system instead of exporting it to the grid where it would earn a feed-in-tariff.  If the whole system is well designed and installed it will  greatly reduce or even eliminate using grid electricity for water heating. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Hot Water Tagged With: ,

What Does The Reduced STC Price Mean For Solar?

August 11, 2017 2017-09-20T11:14:03 by 7 Comments
Solar salesperson

STC prices dropping means solar prices have risen. What has that done to solar payback times?

We were warned.

We all knew this was coming.

But who among us was prepared for the recent tumble in the price of STCs that lower the cost of rooftop solar?

Well, I was. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Economics Of Solar Tagged With: , ,

Peer Reviewed Study: Grid Connect Solar Helps Environment But Batteries Harm It

August 8, 2017 2017-08-08T14:14:24 by 98 Comments
academic in ivory tower

A paper published in ‘Nature’ has agreed with Ronald’s back of an envelope conclusions from last year: at the moment, most grid connected storage harms the environment.

Almost a year ago I wrote an article about how on-grid home battery storage does not help the environment but instead harms it by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and other types of pollution. I am raising this topic again, hoisting it above my head, and waving it around, because a scientific paper published in the journal Nature vindicates my position. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Battery Storage

Solar Panel Torture Testing: Jinko & Trina Do Well

August 1, 2017 2024-01-25T11:00:29 by 4 Comments
DNV-GL reliability scorecard

Now you know what the those DNV-GL engineers *really* get up to in their secret European HQ…

DNV-GL’s PV Module Reliability Scorecard Report for 2017 is out1 and gives some fascinating results.  You can follow that long link in the previous sentence to download your own copy of the report, but for your benefit, I’ve included my own unique analysis below, where I will give my interpretation of the results in 2,000 words or less.

Or possibly more.  I’ve only just started writing so don’t really know just how many words I’ll require, but if it looks like I’ll go over my self-imposed limit I can just leaveoutsomespaces, so it’s not really a problem. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Panels Tagged With:

What is a PERC Solar Panel?

July 28, 2017 2024-01-25T08:01:09 by 20 Comments
perc solar panel

34 years after it was invented ‘PERC’ is now a big deal in solar panel technology. But what the hell is it?

Update 16th April 2019:  Many PERC panels have suffered from LeTID deterioration problems since this article was written.  This article here goes into the problem and this article on the MC Electrical blog covers it in detail and gives information on which PERC panels are resistant to LeTID.

Solar panel manufacturers crave efficiency.  I’m not talking about the labour efficiencies they receive from building new production lines that are robot-heavy and people-light, although they like those too. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Panels Tagged With:

Can An Installer Change The Quoted Price Of My Solar System?

July 25, 2017 2017-07-25T22:59:29 by 25 Comments
stc price

The STC price has plummeted and pushed the price of solar up. What should you do if you’ve already accepted a quote and the installer wants to increase the price?

I’m going to ask you to imagine preparing to buy a rooftop solar system.  I want you to see yourself working hard, saving your money, doing your research, and getting yourself some quotes.  After careful consideration, you decide upon an installer, sign the contract, and transfer a 10% deposit to them.  At that point you would be looking forward to saving money on your electricity bills and doing your bit to help the environment.

Now imagine how you’d feel if, before the day of the installation, the installer contacts you and says the price has gone up and you now have to pay $1,000 extra.

I imagine you wouldn’t be very happy about it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Installation Tagged With: ,

SolarEdge HD Wave Review:  The World’s Smallest And Most Efficient String Inverter

July 20, 2017 2024-01-25T13:20:13 by 45 Comments
ronald and a hdwave

Today Ronald examines the SolarEdge HD Wave inverter. It’s small. But not that small.

It’s An Itsy Bitsy, Teeny Weeny, SolarEdge, HD Wave String Inverter…

SolarEdge, an Israeli company, has produced the HD Wave — the world’s smallest string inverter.  By size, this little cracker takes more DC than any inverter out there.  Not only that, but it grabs DC, uses its funky HD wave technology on it, and spurts out the AC our homes use with greater efficiency than any thing else on the market.  And it’s now available in Australia, starting from a couple of weeks ago. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Inverters Tagged With:

Solar Panel Clamping Zones: Are Your Panels Mounted Correctly?

July 18, 2017 2020-12-30T14:41:12 by 35 Comments
clamping zones

That clamp is not in the zone! After reading this post you will know what that means. (Photo credit: Matt Hines – definitely not one of his installs)

There is one main way solar panels are attached to roofs in Australia and I’m hoping you won’t be surprised to learn it’s not glue.  If you’ve got panels, they are almost certainly fastened to your roof with clamps and held tight in the loving embrace of metal brackets. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Installation Tagged With:
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