Transcript
We often hear a lot of myths about solar energy and what it does and what it doesn't. In this video, we're just going to go over the three or four most common myths we hear a lot and give you some answers to help you with them.
The top 4 we hear most often are that solar energy is too expensive, solar energy runs my house during a power outage, solar energy doesn't save me money because I am at work all day and solar energy has no environmental benefit. So I'll just talk briefly about each of them.
First, solar is too expensive. Well, a decent solar system starts anywhere between $ 6,000 and $ 8,000 and goes up from there to what you want to spend. Well, that may be a lot of money, but we have to remember that using solar energy will save you around 25 to as much as 40% of your spending every year for 30 years. That's a huge return, especially when compared to what you get on a fixed-term deposit or anything else you could do with your money.
Also, my house runs on solar power during a power outage. It will if you have a battery and a smart solar system, but that too becomes a lot more expensive. So solar energy alone won't power your house today.
The reason for this is now that the network fails in the event of a power failure. If your solar system is on and feeding electricity into the grid, it could electrocute the poor guy who works downstairs in the substation. So it just switches itself off in the event of a blackout. If you add a battery we can isolate it so that the battery can run your home during the power outage and the solar system can keep charging the battery.
The third thing we hear is that solar doesn't save me money because I'm never home during the day. Well, it's a little bit true, but it's not entirely true.
First of all, everything is always running at home, whether pool pumps or refrigerators or something like that, something is always running during the day. The other thing is that when you are away from home you export your excess solar power and you get paid between a third and a half of what you buy back that power for at night.
So if you export two kilowatt hours during the day, you pretty much get one for free at night. So it's not that it's not worth it, it's just not quite the same bill as being at home all day.
The fourth thing we hear is that the solar panel manufacturing process is so polluting that solar energy really does not bring any environmental benefit. We hear that a bit and will agree with some of those cheap solar systems that only last three to five years, that's definitely true, but if you buy a good quality, well made system, it will last 25 or 30 years, it offers tremendous environmental benefits, much more than anything we can do as individuals.
So I hope that helped. Please give us a call or fill out a form if you would like further information on the above points.