In April we bought some solar heating from CJ Electrical.
I have not blogged about this before because I wanted to wait for a few months to see how we would fare.
A Scottish guy cold called us. Normally I never respond to cold calls but his Scotch voice was very charming. I had heard that there was a government scheme and I intended to have lots of computers in the house so it seemed sensible to see if there was a way to reduce our fuel bills. Also at work we have been having a green energy drive. Also we had borrowed some money from the bank for a scheme that we did not undertake, so my husband had some money burning a hole in his pocket. He was suddenly very keen on the whole idea.
Hence it was that Dave visited us at the appointed hour and tried to explain to us about solar heating. We had agreed that a visitor could come for exactly forty minutes and no more, which was all that we could spare in our busy lives. Dave explained it all but it was hard to take everything in. He said he could not possibly explain it in forty minutes but we did not want to make another appointment. I understood that you got paid to send energy to the national grid, and your energy use went down, but exactly how it was calculated was quite complicated and seemed to involve estimated use rather than real use. However I did not have the energy or time to devote myself to such nicities. Solar heating was not on my agenda really unless it helped me play Vaughan Williams' English Folksong Suite more effectively, which did not seem likely.
In the meantime I had asked my friends. My boss said she had had her heating installed when the government scheme was first introduced and she saved lots of energy and got paid at a very high rate to feed energy back into the National Grid. Our architect also popped by and was very keen on the idea and suggested a local firm, but when we looked up the local firm's website it did not seem to have been updated in the last four years and the office was no longer where it said it was.
My main worry was choosing a company that then went bankrupt and did not pay anything. Apart from that I did not see what could go wrong with the deal. I researched CJ Solar on the internet and they seemed like an excellent company. They were really CJ electrical, a company who have been established a long time, run by the same boss, who did not have any former bankruptcies registered against his name. They had a big warehouse, indeed, I soon found out, they had a branch in Norwich and one in Chelmsford. I was pleased to see on Google Street View that they had a large factory and had installed Solar panels all over it, obviously having faith in their own product. Also the boss had taken his staff for a holiday somewhere, so they must be a company with a nice work ethos.
Dave also told us that as part of the package we would get something called Nest, which would reduce our energy intake greatly because it would measure exactly how much energy we used each day and then a computer program would turn the energy on and off whenever was necessary to keep the house at exactly the same temperature. We had already installed a similar product at great extent two years before, but it did not occur to me to tell him this since he was supposed to have done an energy survey of the house, so I assumed he saw this. My nephew was staying with us at the time and he assured us that if we had electric radiators we would also save several thousand pounds in energy a year. It seems that anyone just says this to everyone in the heating business, assuming that because you are teachers you know nothing, and taking no interest in or account of whatever energy saving products you might have already installed.
We decided that we were keen to get the solar heating and energy. When our plumber arrived he was very impressed with the amount of energy our solar heating had generated. (although he had to put his phone into the boiler cupboard to read the screen, which was tucked away where nobody could read it.) He was not impressed that the expensive system he had installed two years ago was no-where in sight, and wondered how he was supposed to charge up the boiler since our internet password had been changed two weeks before and now there was no way to communicate with the inaccessible box in the boiler. I had forgotten how to do this, although when my husband came home he explained that if you press the button on the right three times it creates a boost which charges up the system. I think I have mentioned before what a flipping pain this NEST system is. Perhaps we are bad at setting it, but it seems to forget when to come on and reverts to 9 degrees which is hopeless, so I am always having to go to the little disc and set it back to 20. Why isn't the default 20 or so? I am not a moron but it is a very complicated device to set, and I do not want to invest my spare hours learning how to use such a complicated system. I have no interest in turning my internet on and off from work. I am more interested in whether or not it comes on in the morning or whether my house is freezing when I wake up, and whether or not it takes me three days to figure out how to turn on my heating every time the internet stops or I change a password. Frankly the Nest is a bit of a nightmare. My husband quite like it, I suspect, since he is the one who has all the control via his phone and he seems to enjoy being the one who knows all the technical stuff. We rang CJ electrical to see if they could help but they said they only installed it and did not really understand how it worked. They referred us to NEST which was OK but it took us a long time to find the NEST UK support phone number which was not listed clearly on any of the literature or websites.
We are very pleased, conversely, with the solar panels themselves. After three months we received notification that our energy supplier was going to pay us £328 for the energy we'd paid into the national grid over the three summer months. This was separate from our energy bill. We have lots of lodgers so we use a lot of energy, which we did not before, so it is difficult to say how much the bill has been affected. During the summer the electricity meter started going backwards because we were feeding more energy into the national grid than we were taking out of it, so the energy company had to visit and install a new meter reader (free) to take the new arrangements into account.
Apart from the Nest aspect, I was pleased with CJ Solar. The final bill came to well under £10,000.
Most of all, which is, in my book, the most important measure of things, my husband is quite chuffed about the whole thing and it makes him happy. What more could you ask for?
I have not blogged about this before because I wanted to wait for a few months to see how we would fare.
A Scottish guy cold called us. Normally I never respond to cold calls but his Scotch voice was very charming. I had heard that there was a government scheme and I intended to have lots of computers in the house so it seemed sensible to see if there was a way to reduce our fuel bills. Also at work we have been having a green energy drive. Also we had borrowed some money from the bank for a scheme that we did not undertake, so my husband had some money burning a hole in his pocket. He was suddenly very keen on the whole idea.
Hence it was that Dave visited us at the appointed hour and tried to explain to us about solar heating. We had agreed that a visitor could come for exactly forty minutes and no more, which was all that we could spare in our busy lives. Dave explained it all but it was hard to take everything in. He said he could not possibly explain it in forty minutes but we did not want to make another appointment. I understood that you got paid to send energy to the national grid, and your energy use went down, but exactly how it was calculated was quite complicated and seemed to involve estimated use rather than real use. However I did not have the energy or time to devote myself to such nicities. Solar heating was not on my agenda really unless it helped me play Vaughan Williams' English Folksong Suite more effectively, which did not seem likely.
In the meantime I had asked my friends. My boss said she had had her heating installed when the government scheme was first introduced and she saved lots of energy and got paid at a very high rate to feed energy back into the National Grid. Our architect also popped by and was very keen on the idea and suggested a local firm, but when we looked up the local firm's website it did not seem to have been updated in the last four years and the office was no longer where it said it was.
My main worry was choosing a company that then went bankrupt and did not pay anything. Apart from that I did not see what could go wrong with the deal. I researched CJ Solar on the internet and they seemed like an excellent company. They were really CJ electrical, a company who have been established a long time, run by the same boss, who did not have any former bankruptcies registered against his name. They had a big warehouse, indeed, I soon found out, they had a branch in Norwich and one in Chelmsford. I was pleased to see on Google Street View that they had a large factory and had installed Solar panels all over it, obviously having faith in their own product. Also the boss had taken his staff for a holiday somewhere, so they must be a company with a nice work ethos.
Dave also told us that as part of the package we would get something called Nest, which would reduce our energy intake greatly because it would measure exactly how much energy we used each day and then a computer program would turn the energy on and off whenever was necessary to keep the house at exactly the same temperature. We had already installed a similar product at great extent two years before, but it did not occur to me to tell him this since he was supposed to have done an energy survey of the house, so I assumed he saw this. My nephew was staying with us at the time and he assured us that if we had electric radiators we would also save several thousand pounds in energy a year. It seems that anyone just says this to everyone in the heating business, assuming that because you are teachers you know nothing, and taking no interest in or account of whatever energy saving products you might have already installed.
We decided that we were keen to get the solar heating and energy. When our plumber arrived he was very impressed with the amount of energy our solar heating had generated. (although he had to put his phone into the boiler cupboard to read the screen, which was tucked away where nobody could read it.) He was not impressed that the expensive system he had installed two years ago was no-where in sight, and wondered how he was supposed to charge up the boiler since our internet password had been changed two weeks before and now there was no way to communicate with the inaccessible box in the boiler. I had forgotten how to do this, although when my husband came home he explained that if you press the button on the right three times it creates a boost which charges up the system. I think I have mentioned before what a flipping pain this NEST system is. Perhaps we are bad at setting it, but it seems to forget when to come on and reverts to 9 degrees which is hopeless, so I am always having to go to the little disc and set it back to 20. Why isn't the default 20 or so? I am not a moron but it is a very complicated device to set, and I do not want to invest my spare hours learning how to use such a complicated system. I have no interest in turning my internet on and off from work. I am more interested in whether or not it comes on in the morning or whether my house is freezing when I wake up, and whether or not it takes me three days to figure out how to turn on my heating every time the internet stops or I change a password. Frankly the Nest is a bit of a nightmare. My husband quite like it, I suspect, since he is the one who has all the control via his phone and he seems to enjoy being the one who knows all the technical stuff. We rang CJ electrical to see if they could help but they said they only installed it and did not really understand how it worked. They referred us to NEST which was OK but it took us a long time to find the NEST UK support phone number which was not listed clearly on any of the literature or websites.
We are very pleased, conversely, with the solar panels themselves. After three months we received notification that our energy supplier was going to pay us £328 for the energy we'd paid into the national grid over the three summer months. This was separate from our energy bill. We have lots of lodgers so we use a lot of energy, which we did not before, so it is difficult to say how much the bill has been affected. During the summer the electricity meter started going backwards because we were feeding more energy into the national grid than we were taking out of it, so the energy company had to visit and install a new meter reader (free) to take the new arrangements into account.
Apart from the Nest aspect, I was pleased with CJ Solar. The final bill came to well under £10,000.
Most of all, which is, in my book, the most important measure of things, my husband is quite chuffed about the whole thing and it makes him happy. What more could you ask for?
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