Finding the chase and cutting to it

Oh no, not another depressing one?

Hey, stop that. No, I’m back on energy consumption now the clocks have gone forward…

Oh, all right then, though looking at energy prices, it’s not that happy-a-subject

Thanks, I think.

Like many couples, we sat down and looked at some of the changes in the last budget. While there is unlikely to ever be another deal like FIT (feed in tariff), there are some interesting things even if you aren’t in a Council Band D or lower house.

Like what?

Well, many energy saving devices and installations are now zero rated for VAT, please see Energy efficiency improvements including solar panels and batteries. Please note the first bit of the article is for major installations, like air and ground source heat pumps. There’s also the government article on the changes here.

While solar panels were often VAT free, there used to be a number of conditions, but these are now zero rated, full stop. Same with batteries, which were only zero rated before the last budget if they were installed along with a solar array.

As I said, our conversation at lunch time strayed into batteries and what we’d like to have as a result. We’d still need to buy a couple of solar panels to qualify for the zero rate, but they’d soon recoup themselves with the smart export guarantee.

Given our situation, it’s not an easy sum. The solar is very standard but our vehicle to grid makes our usage a little unusual. We’ve got the house tuned so we’re rarely using more than 310Wh, although that peaks for cooking, boiling the kettle, etc. So 24*.32=8kWh battery.

But the car changes all that! When the V2G is storing energy, we peak up at 3kWh, lets say that happens 3 times a day. While we effectively don’t pay for that electricity (we get the money back when we donate), we’re still drawing 9kWh over three hours. Much of that is while we’re generating energy from our solar cells, but still.

We’re also begining to be able to use our spare solar power to heat our hot water – saving us burning gas during the summer months.

Anyway, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be an easy sum. Speaking of which, we’ve just got the barbeque out. Which should save a little more energy tonight, even if it is way to cold to eat out this time of year 🙂 and it is only carbon neutral.

I bought a piece of beef for Sunday lunch and the left overs are being made into burgers for tea tonight.

Have a great one!