Find a Solar Panel Installer you can trust in Dromore.

It’s vital to purchase a solar panel system that suits your property. If you’re investing in a solar panel system, it makes the most financial sense to get the biggest one possible. However, whether you can do this or not depends on budget and space.

Here’s an idea of how much roof or ground space you’ll need to install a few different sizes of commercial solar panel system.

Solar panel system size, No. of solar panels, Approximate area required

11kW, 44, 64m²

20kW, 80, 116m²

30kW, 120, 173m²

40kW, 160, 231m²

50kW, 200, 288m²

Solar thermal panels are panels that can be used to heat your hot water. The collectors, which are either evacuated tube panels or flat plate collectors, harness heat from the sun and transfer it to a heat transfer liquid that heats up water that is stored in a hot water cylinder. You can use a boiler or immersion heater as a back-up in the winter or to heat the water up further to reach the right temperature.

Evacuated tube panels involve a bank of glass tubes mounted on the roof tiles, and while they’re usually more expensive, they’re more efficient than flat plate collectors. They’re exactly what they sound like – flat panels that can be fixed onto your roof tiles or integrated into the roof.

Having a solar thermal system will reduce your energy bills since heat from the sun is free, so you won’t have to rely on your traditional heating as much. You’ll also be doing your bit for the environment – if you have a natural gas heating system, you could save up to 295kg of CO2 every year.

Another benefit to solar thermal panels is that you might be eligible for payments through the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), which is a Government scheme to encourage people to take up renewable heating technologies. As long as you have your system installed by an MCS-registered installer and you meet a few other requirements, you could receive payments of up to £525 per year for seven years. And since the average solar thermal panel system costs £5,500, you could pay off over half of your system just with these payments. That’s not even considering that you could save up to £60 a year on your energy bills if you have a gas system.

Solar panels can be pretty expensive, so require an initial investment. However, a quality solar panel installation can be very financially beneficial, saving you money in the long run. It does this in two main ways.

Firstly, using electricity generated by your solar panels means that you have to use less power from the national grid. Once you’ve bought your solar panels, your solar electricity is essentially free, meaning that you’re saving money by using this instead of power supplied by your energy company. If you want to maximise these savings, invest in a solar battery so you can store unused solar electricity ready for when you need it.

You can also earn money with your commercial solar panels through the Smart Export Guarantee [https://solar-panels.quotatis.co.uk/smart-export-guarantee/]. This is a government scheme that says that all licenced energy suppliers with 150,000 customers or more have to offer a tariff to renewable energy generators. When you generate solar electricity but don’t use it immediately it gets fed back to the grid – the tariff pays you for every kWh of this.

At the moment there’s no minimum tariff that an energy company has to offer – it only has to be above zero. However, many energy companies are competing to offer the best deal, so you can definitely find a tariff that will pay you for all the unused solar electricity you generate.

If you’re thinking about installing a solar thermal system in your house, it’s always important to put into consideration numerous factors before you proceed. While some solar thermal systems are suitable for use at home, there are also some that are suitable for businesses or organizations which normally requires a big amount of hot water like hotels, restaurants, schools, hospitals and many more. You’ll also find some types available in the market that are suitable for communities to satisfy communal hot water demands.

It should, however, be noted that solar thermal systems do not have the capacity to produce all the hot water demand of a house. In the UK, an average household will need an annual water heating of between 3000kWh to 5000kWh. Whereas, a solar thermal system is only able to meet about 40 percent to 60 percent of this demand.

With that in mind, it’s also worth noting that during the summer months when the solar radiation is at its peak and hot water demand is relatively lower when compared to other seasons, a solar thermal system may be able to provide all of your household’s hot water needs. This implies that during this period you may not find the need to operate your boiler at all. However, during winter or colder months, when you have a higher hot water demands in contrary to a lower solar radiation, a solar thermal system will only be able to take care of about 20 percent of your household’s hot water needs. And that ultimately implies that during this period, you’ll need to rely more on a alternative or backup source of heat like gas, coal, electricity, oil or LPG.

Are you currently weighting the possibilities of adding a solar system to your commercial building? With lots of commercial property owners in the UK using solar now, many more are gradually coming to terms with the numerous benefits they stand to derive by getting one. Therefore, if you’re thinking about adding the system to your commercial building but do not know where to start, you’ve come to the right place.

In this post, our aim is to help you calculate the number of solar panels you’ll need to power your entire commercial building. Starting from the panels, you can begin by taking into account everything that makes use of power in your commercial building to get a good idea of how many you’ll need.

• To get started, you’ll have to determine the number of watts used by your commercial building. To get this, you simply have to go through your utility bill for kilowatt-hours (kWh). This varies amongst buildings and being able to identify your daily average energy usage will assist you in getting your solar panel needs.
• Once done, you’ll also have to determine the peak sunlight hours - having in mind that the solar panels only work when under direct sunlight. Once determined, you can then multiply the figure in hours by your home’s hourly energy usage and divide by your selected solar panel’s wattage.

In general, a medium-sized commercial building making use of an average amount of electricity will require about 70 average quality solar panels so as to cover its entire electricity needs. These are, however, just averages, so yours could be more or less so getting the idea is vital here.

Yes – solar panels do work in winter. Contrary to popular belief, solar panels can still work under daylight, even if it's not hot. Of course, they won’t generate as much electricity as they would during the summer months, as the days are shorter, but they will still generate electricity during those daylight hours.

Once you know how solar panels work, it’s easy to understand why solar panels work in the winter. Solar panels are made up of photovoltaic (PV) cells, which are units usually made out of silicon. These cells contain electrons that create energy when light hits them. The cell can then convert this energy into usable electric current and into your system to be used around the home.

Although it might seem strange, solar PV cells can actually work better when it’s cold. Too much heat around the cell can cause it to be inefficient, due to the difference in energy between the energy from the sunlight and the electrons in the solar cell. During cold weather, the difference between them is higher, so more

The higher the energy difference between the two sets of energy sources, the more power that the cell can produce when it’s struck by light. Of course, the downside is that there are fewer daylight hours in the winter, so you’ll still see a drop in energy production – but at least you know that your solar panels are still working efficiently. The other thing to bear in mind is that obstructions like snow and lots of cloud cover will impact the amount of electricity your solar panels will produce. Luckily the UK doesn’t get too much heavy snow, so any snow that does settle on the panels will melt quickly. As for cloud cover, even on exceptionally cloudy days your panels will still generate some electricity – just not as much as they would on a clear day.