Over the last four years, I’ve written thousands of words and made hours of videos answering the question:
“Finn – there are hundreds of solar companies out there – they all claim that “they are the best and everyone else is second rate or worse”!
How do I choose a good, honest, solar installer that will charge a fair price and look after me and my panels if anything goes wrong down the track?”
At the end of the day – if you follow these 5 golden rules you can’t really go wrong: [Read more…]
How do you choose a good solar inverter? It’s a really important question. If you choose a bad inverter, it may turn out to be noisy, inefficient and unreliable. If you have a look at the inverter reviews that are coming in to SQ, some inverters appear to have an awful failure rate. For example at the time of writing the Beijing Kinglong New Energy (KLNE) inverter reviews report 7 failures from 13 reviews! Ouch!
Here is my attempt to answer this important question. And I’ve provided a transcript of my rantings below the video. [Read more…]
Will 2013 bring some stability to the solar industry?
What’s the one factor that most solar fans will ask from our elected representatives as we cast our eyes towards 2013? The answer of course will vary according according to circumstances. Some may ask for more focus on other forms of large scale solar power such as concentrated solar power, others may call for increased investment in solar research and development. Still more may call for an expansion of present solar programs; you know the ones that always seem to be under the threat of cutbacks. [Read more…]
Tokelau is 100% Solar Woo-Hoo!
Solar energy in the Pacific took a giant leap forward this week when New Zealand-controlled territory Tokelau completed the switch from diesel to solar as its main fuel source. Tokelau is now nearly 100 percent reliant on the sun for its power needs and its model is showing the way for the rest of the world. [Read more…]
One steaming pile of Solar BS that you hear all the time from worst sales people in this industry – who will feed you any line to get a sale – is that polycrystalline panels are better than monocrystalline solar panels, or vice versa.
In this video I finally get off my chest why you should avoid anyone spouting such drivel:
Transcript follows if you don’t like listening to angry, sweary solar geeks, and I go into great detail about the two technologies over on the main site:
Hint: It’s a bit more complicated than you might think!
By my reckoning 25% of people buying solar power systems want to save the planet as a priority. The other 75% want to save their bottom line and saving the planet is a nice side-effect.
I get a lot of emails saying: “Help! My bills are [insert large number here] dolars a quarter – what size solar system do I need?”
The answer to this question is quite longwinded – but if you want to understand whether a solar system is worthwhile for you financially – you need to understand this stuff! So I made a video to help explain. If you are considering buying a solar system I strongly recommend watching this:
[Note: Since I made this video the Victorian and QLD Feed In tariffs are no longer more generous than the rest of the country – they are both 8c per kWh at time of writing!]
Did you hear about the Queensland proposal a couple of weeks ago that proposed an 8c per kWh GROSS Feed In Tariff? That would mean Queenslanders would have to sell ALL their solar power to the retailers for 8c (yes – ALL of it – even the stuff that they used in their home). And then buy it back for about 30c.
Yup – that would be called institutionalised theft.
Stories like that make most people want to get off the grid altogether.
So I get quite a few quote requests these days for “Off Grid” solar power systems. However most people don’t fully realise what a big and expensive step it is to cut the wires to the grid.
So I made this video to explain what it really means to go off grid in 2012. I hope you enjoy it:
Ever wondered how solar panels actually work? We all know that they convert light into electricity – but have you ever stopped to wonder just how the heck that happens? Here I do my best to explain the inner functioning of a solar panel in plain English:
Solar Hot Water is fast becoming the poor cousin of Solar PV (AKA Solar Electricity). Consumers just seem to prefer solar PV to solar hot water these days. In fact solar hot water has gone from almost zero to 1,000,000 roofs in about 30 years, whereas PV has gone from almost zero to 1,000,000 roofs in less than 6 years. There is now more PV than Solar HW out there! Unbelievable.
It doesn’t help that retailers prefer to sell PV over hot water – for a whole bunch of reasons that I’ll go into in a future blog post.
Here’s a video where I answer the question posed in the title: Should you buy Solar Hot Water or PV first?, But first I answer a much more fundamental question that creates an enormous amount of confusion out there:
And here’t the transcript for the video-phobes amongst you: [Read more…]
I’ve been busy making videos that answer some common solar questions. Here I talk about Feed In Tariffs and what to do if your nasty energy retailer wants to punish you for going solar…
Transcription below for those who prefer to read: [Read more…]
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