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submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I'm thinking of getting solar panels and a battery for our house.

What's your setup like, and is there anything you wish you'd set up differently if you were going to install it again? What supplier are you with?

A company extremely local to us is offering 12x Aiko Energy panels (465 watt), with a Sunsynk 5 kW inverter and a 5.32kWh battery. Octopus Energy are offering a similar set up for a similar price, but they're using 450 watt panels, so with using 12 panels I'd be potentially be losing 180 watts vs what the other company is offering. Is that a significant amount or would it basically not really amount to much additional power?

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

DIY is the way to go. You will be able to get a dramatically larger system for the same price. I do not recommend grid tie it's not worth the rebate there's a ton of red tape and you will have to install an insane amount of extra equipment if you want to be able to actually have power during a power outage. Using an off-grid inverter with self consumption means that it's basically just a computer UPS on steroids and it also removes a ton of the installation red tape that exists for grid tie inverters.

They are actually quite simple to install correctly to code and then for extra piece of mind you can have it inspected by an electrician which is way way cheaper than having them do the installation. I decided to spend roughly $20,000 on solar and for that money I got an entire pallet of solar panels 50 of them 30 KW hours of battery and 12kWh of inverter output.

Getting the solar panels installed is a hell of a lot of manual labor that's for sure definitely one of the better workouts I've had in a while but when I compared what any solar installer in my area would give me for that price? It was a fraction of the system less than half the total solar panel output half the inverter output no batteries and most companies don't want to talk to you about a system unless it's gridtied.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Cheers for your advice! Honestly it's extremely unlikely I'd do it myself. I'd need to get at tonne of scaffolding and I wouldn't know anything about attaching the panels to the roof or doing any of the wiring!

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I love DIY maybe too much, but this strongly violates my "nothing structural, nothing roofing" rule.
They are both things I'd want a massive company to be doing, just from the sheer magnitude of the problems if they screw it all up.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Exactly. There's a high chance of me dropping a panel off the roof, or worse, myself.

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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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