How quickly do solar panels pay for themselves?

I doubt that having a water tank on a suburban block that has town water would be likely to ever pay for itself but I concede for the purpose of discussion it might.

I also doubt that the standing charges for the connection are relevant to the return on the tank. Let us try a thought experiment.

You spend X dollars on a tank and through its use you save Y kilolitres year from the part of your water bill that is charged on consumption. The consumption part of your water bill is charged at Z dollars per kilolitre. So it takes X/Y*Z years to get your money back. The Council or water authority can double or abolish the standing charge and it makes no difference, your payback time on the tank is the same. The standing charges only come into play if you are considering going off the network not if you buy (or don’t buy) a tank.

This is the same as electricity, no matter how much of your consumption you may save or how much power you sell back to the grid you still have the connection fees unless you go off grid.

This leads to the risk of a self-reinforcing decay: a death spiral. The more people defect off grid the fewer that are left to pay the fixed network costs that are inescapable. If the fixed fees of those remaining are increased to cover the loss of defectors’ revenue this makes it more attractive for others to defect, thus leading to more defections. Left to run that way such a network funding system will self destruct. Hopefully our fearless leaders will work out what to do before it gets that bad.

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I think this is where you are misunderstanding my point- if the standing charge was removed, the council would increase the cost per kl to maintain revenue. This would improve payback times, as well as encouraging water conservation.

The death spiral of the electricity grid has been discussed for a few years now, and the electricity industry has no one to blame other than themselves… although a bit of government assistance helped them get into this position…

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Perhaps if you had said that…

I looked at solar for our home, where we have gas HWS & cooking and the standing charge (service, network fees, minimums etc) forms half our bill. It was not economical, saving about $600 in power and if we paid the $476 to connect to feed into the grid, at $0.04/kwh it would take 11,900 excess kWh to pay that back before we broke even. To feed-in we have to stay on the grid. To go off grid with batteries & generator back-up (cost us $1,400 to have wired into switchboard - power goes off a lot on our SWER), would save us $1,200 pa. but we would lose the $75 rebate for 3 years for signing up for monthly direct debit and the Qld Govt one-off election promised $50 rebate and the Qld Senior’s rebate (which we are still trying to get paid despite being eligible for 3 years). It gets really complicated…

I have a Qld rental house with a young family on a low income with a high electricity bill. I wanted to do something for them, so I am looking at solar. They are part of the widening divide between those who own a roof, who got in early at $0.44/kWh feed in and those who don’t own a roof, like my tenants. The Qld Govt is trialling a scheme for rental properties, but it just seems like a financial arrangement where the Landlord & Tenant share the feed-in, which at that rate would be $0.02/ kWh. Yes, solar adds value to a house, but in my area with falling prices (and I have reduced the rent and provided other cost saving measures) it makes it unattractive. I would be happier to see a Landlord matching grant for rural & remote areas where capital gains are non-existent, rents are low, tenant incomes are low. That is, where it is not possible to justify the expense of solar. In Qld rural & remote means there is only one electricity retailer, and it’s owned by the State Govt.

Before I get painted as a greedy landlord, I bought this near new house specifically to help the community retain the disadvantaged. My tenant earns approx $40k, his partner can’t get work, the local Real Estate agent would not rent a house to them (she considered them too messy - but that’s what little kids do - they grow out of it and he has fixed everything), I helped him get his rent salary sacrificed and (with his help) built garage, sheds, verandahs, replaced equipment with more efficient and reduced his rent. Over 5 years the value of the house has fallen about $150k due to drought, council amalgamation (loss of jobs) etc, but hasn’t helped the rental market, but I rent at approx $100 week less than market rate. He gives a lot back to the community as a volunteer. I cover my costs, but don’t, and won’t make anything out of it.

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Ahh but you do get something back, it may not be cash but it will be a better community, likely a lot gratitude to you, and a feeling that you helped. While maybe not as tangible/usable as money they can pay back in other ways.

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This depends very much on where you live. We’ve had solar hot water panels for the past 30+ years, and they work really well for us. We are in Brisbane, which helps :slight_smile: .While I have quantified our savings with our PV panels (17.5% return), I havent done the same for the hot water. I do know that we very rarely have to use the electric power booster for the hot water. It’s probably about six months since we required any electric power at all, and that was for maybe a couple of hours after 3-4 days of overcast weather.

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Hello Zackarii,

I’m impressed by your selflessness and commitment to your community. I hope other landlords are inspired to follow suit. I have recently read about some companies that are enabling landlords to provide and sell solar to their tenants. I’m not across the details but it’s something you could look into.

Some companies include SunTenants, Allume, Matter, Powerledger and Wattwatchers.

For more information:
https://www.suntenants.com/for-tenants/
http://renew.org.au/articles/raising-the-roof-solar-for-renters-and-apartment-dwellers/

Alison

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And you could explore SonnenFlat which I’m told is also a possibility for landlords. A representative from the company tells me this is especially so when coupled with Natural Solar’s interest free finance, however I have not looked closely at this and cannot make any firm judgment.

https://sonnen.com.au/en-au/sonnenflat

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We have solar panels and enjoy cheaper power however we mainly installed them on environmental grounds. Think of the world we’ll leave our grandchildren.

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Another one here:

They are partners with Sun Tenants

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And here’s another one Digital Solar
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/digital-solar-opens-up-solar-power-to-australian-renters-20160304-gnajxz.html

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We have solar panels. Got them when they cost the earth, but they have almost paid for themselves. We thought it would take about 7 years to repay the cost but it will take about 8. We have less than a year to go. We run two spreadsheets; one records the amount of credit we get from the panels and the other keeps exactly what we generate. Since having the panels we have had to pay a small fee for electricity about twice. That means we are in credit. We are also able to get the higher input payment due to when we had them installed.

We did this because we were just starting retirement and thought it would be a good way to lower our bill.

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If you regularly get no bills and only paid for electricity twice in 7 years then they paid for themselves years ago.

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Good of you to know without the spreadsheets to know that our solar panels are paid for. I will reiterate they will have paid for themselves in less than a year.

I too am an early solar rooftop adopter paid $10K for a small system 9 years ago and received a government rebate of $8K when they were installed and running so my out of pocket was around $2450 after he extra cost of a smart meter etc was installed.
I do still get a average quarterly bill around $200 but it was prior to the install closer to $350 and without needing a spreadsheet I deduced that they saved me around $600 per year on my previous non solar install power bills and therefore were paid off around year 5.
That is how I can deduce you realistically had them paid off years ago if you have only received a couple of small power bills in 7 years.

Good for you. We didn’t get anything like that in 2011. So your figures don’t relate to us and really you’ve made an assumption.

We actually know how much we have generated in the time as well as how much of it we used and how much we received credit for.

We installed a 10.14kW system on our roof in Canberra nearly two years ago. The feed-in-tariff is insignificant but, based on our electricity bills for the year preceding installation, our system will pay for itself in six years. We are both retired and spend a lot of time at home, and we keep the house liveable 24/7.

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In SE Qld, we have had our $14K 5KW solar system for 5½ year, and received just over $7K credit (at 51c/kWh) on our electricity account.

With four of us at home full time using electricity, we export to the grid 23.95% of what we import, with an average of 7.33kWh exported to the grid per day.

If we extrapolate, we can expect the system to pay for itself in 5½ years, for a 11 year cost recovery.

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What is the difference?

I was trying to be clear and explaining the figures:
5½ years more to go before we have recovered the cost. A total of 11 years.