Last week we saw our back-garden neighbours having some building work done on their roof. There appeared to be some kinds of long poles or perhaps scaffolding (annoyingly we couldn’t see exactly what was happening). Talking to our next-door neighbour later it turned out that there were solar panels being fitted on the roof.
All this really surprised us as my engineer husband had looked into the issues about getting solar panels for your home and generating solar electricity and decided that our roof faced the wrong way – and here was a neighbour with a roof facing in an even less favourable direction than ours having panels fitted! He had also though that living in the north meant that any systems would receive far less sun power than those further – it appears that this is so, but not significantly.
The fact that our roof faces south east means less sun energy capture than due south, but would still be OK. So, It seems it could be worthwhile having at least an opinion on the likely generating capacity of our roof. The main calculations are about how long it would take us to get payback on investment – it appears to be advantageous that the Feed in Tariff pays you for all electricity generated even if we used it all. It is a bonus to think that renewables like solar energy releases no CO2 and creates no pollution. It appears certainly worth the effort of finding out about our roof’s potential.