It is now almost five months now since Mark and Bob installed my Solar Panels. Initially I had contacted Cuberoot Energy and several other companies for a quotation with the goal of reducing my annual bills. While this was not the cheapest quote, I received they were very knowledgeable when I spoke to them and were able to explain the difference between the systems they had on offer. They were also more than willing to answer all the questions I had; for this reason, I decided to go with them.

The initial installation took two days. The first day was getting the ten panels mounted on the roof the second was a lot of electrical work with connecting the inverter and laying cables. All work they carried out was very neat with little mess.

Due to availability of pats I had to wait two months for my battery. This did mean that I was able to get statistical information about the difference between having only solar panels compared to also having a battery. During June and July 75% of my power was provided by the PV system. This increased to 90% once I had a battery. We are now halfway through October, and I am still using only 0.5 kWh from the grid most days which, at current prices, is about £0.50 a day. I have topped up the battery overnight from the grid a couple of times when there was cheaper energy available.

The Solar Edge system has a phone application that gives a good visual representation of what is happening with the system. You can see with a glance how much power you are generating, consuming, and importing/exporting to the grid. There are a couple of annoyances with the application. The system does not distinguish between Solar Production and System Production meaning power coming out of the battery is shown as part of the daily production. This is not a problem in the summer but when you start to charge from the grid during winter it gives a distorted picture of how much the system is producing. The second issue is that you cannot change the charging profile for the battery using the phone app you have to use the website. Added to which you also must have an installer level logon to get access to the “Storage Profile” and “Energy Manager” pages. If you are on Economy 7 or a similar tariff with fixed periods of cheap rate electricity you only need to set this once. Those of us on time of use tariffs such as Agile want to be able to change daily which means it takes a bit more effort. My only regret is not spending the extra money on a Tesla Powerwall because it would be easier to configure and easier to expand the system later.

Overall, I am happy with the system and very happy with the smooth installation and support I have received. I also organised for Cuberoot Energy to install the same system for my mother to reduce her bills. Once I have some spare capital I shall be coming back to Mark and Bob to get a second array fitted on my smaller roof to boost the overall annual production.

What I have certainly worked for reducing my bills. Since the initial install I have not had to pay an electricity bill! Now a four-kilowatt peak system is not going to provide all the power I need over winter but my expectation are my annual bill will be down to £100 as I had plenty of excess production during the summer which I was able to sell back to the grid. I also had a solar diverter fitted as part of the system so have been heating all my hot water with electricity rather than gas which is an additional saving.