Extras

Many quotes will not be thoroughly itemised, so there are some "extra" costs which you will need to be aware of.

  • "Bird Guarding" is a way of mounting a mesh at the sides of the panels to stop birds (and other critters) from getting under the panels and building homes there.
  • If you roofs are particularly inacessible, special scaffolding arrangements may be needed.
  • If any of your panels will be shaded then you will need to have optimizers and combiners or micro-inverters. This is necessary to stop the shaded panels from lowering the output of the unshaded ones.
  • If you want to have power during a power cut, extra equipment is needed.
  • Standard equipment is not suitable for life-support equipment. If you have such needs, you will require special equipment.

Some installation companies are only interested in making a quick sale and moving on to the next one. If a sales person tells you that they can't install bird guarding without invalidating the warranty, move on to another company. Likewise, if they can't offer a system with battery that provides at least one battery-backed-up socket for power outages, then you have not found your installation company yet.

If your roof clearly has some shading at one time of the day, then the sales person should be factoring in extra equipment to allow for that. This will be some form of optimizer or individual microinverters serving panels.

You should find that all companies give very similar estimates of what a system will save you over the long term (allowing for different system sizes). This is because the quoting process is, to some extent, regulated (or at least everybody is using simialr software). If someone quotes something wildly different then they MAY be offering you something that other companies cannot - but it would behoove you to dig a bit deeper to check out their claims.

If you MUST finance your system (and, in my opinion, you should not) then think about other options than the installer's plan. Often companies selling this sort of product have high interest rates and/or hide the true cost of the financing.

Lastly, don't be TOO impressed by the trade association guarantees associated with solar power equipment. In my opinion, these associations seem to be there partly to protect the company, not just the customer.

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