Renewable energy has really started to overtake fossil fuels, especially solar power. It is available for most businesses or homeowners to install. If your premises get direct sunlight for a few hours a day, and most do, it means that solar is always going to be a sustainable source of energy to utilise. Following our office renovations at GF Electrical, we decided to have solar panels fitted on the roof of our unit by PV Plus Ltd. A company we have had a good relationship with over the years.

We have a perfect roof; south facing, so we get sun for the whole working day. It was a no brainer really and not sure why we had not done it years ago!

Generating our own electricity on-site means that we are relying less on the National Grid to provide power to our business.

We are offsetting our environmental impact. We feed back into the grid most days due to generating more electricity than the office consumption and not forgetting the weekends. Currently there is no payback scheme in place or other benefit in kind offered but at least we know we are helping and contributing to reducing our footprint.

Another advantage was that we chose to change our EV charge points to ‘Zappi’ an EV wall charger compatible with solar. Again, a perfect way to help us move towards achieving carbon neutrality.

Solar Edge

There is an app called SolarEdge, that allows you to view how much energy the panels are generating from the sun throughout the day. Easy-to-follow charts to analyse and compare the energy produced daily and the consumption over time. Apart from seeing our energy performance and impact, it is rewarding to see that costs are being saved to slowly make back the money invested to install them!

In the screenshot below, you can see that we produced 38 kWh in 1 day, which is the most we have produced in a single day so far. This was on the 17^th of July, during the heatwave!

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