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EV Quest is the electric vehicle podcast for New Zealand, Australia and beyond. Hosted by Adrian Maidment in New Zealand, and joined regularly by Riz Akhtar from Carloop, EV Quest delivers the latest EV news, reviews and industry insights from across New Zealand, Australia and the global EV market.
Each week you’ll hear conversations about electric cars, charging infrastructure, EV ownership and the future of sustainable mobility.
From interviews with EV industry leaders to reviews of the newest electric vehicles, EV Quest keeps you connected to the fast-changing world of electric transport.
EVQUEST PODCAST_Dale Interview
Adrian: [00:00:00] Kia ora and welcome to the EV Quiz Podcast. I'm Adrian Maedment, your host. Solar panels are now a big deal in New Zealand. They're even an election issue. I want them on my roof, so I thought I'd get some advice from someone who has recently been there and done that by putting them on their roof. Today I'm talking with Dale, who recently had solar panels and a home battery installed.
We'll be covering what the install process was really like, what he learned from the install, and what it's like living with solar panels and a battery. Hello, Dale. Kia ora, Adrian. Good to have you here. Nice to be here. Yep. Yeah, I thought w- since, uh, you're my first solar s- solar panel customer and owner, so I thought it'd be good advice for people to find out.
A lot of people are considering it at the moment. They are. Maybe we'll start off, what made you decide to install solar in the first place? Well, we just purchased a new home, and so we had some capital from selling our previous home that we thought it would be wise to future-proof our energy use. And let's face it, electricity [00:01:00] prices are not getting any cheaper.
And so we thought, "Well, we've got the capital here. We may as well invest in our future." And so we did. And we'll do the classic... You've got, like, the sort of the classic family, kids situation, so- Yeah, I've got two kids, one teenager who uses power like anything. PlayStation's lis- left on, TV's always left on, always wants to have the heat pump on in the wintertime and summertime, so we're a fairly hefty energy user.
So it made sense for us to try and reduce the energy cost. And what made you go for solar and the battery? Oh, that was... That's a good question, 'cause when I first researched it, a lot of the stuff that I would come across online said that I didn't actually need to have- A battery. But when I kind of looked at what the battery would do for us, which meant that we could time shift our power usage or store power in the battery from cheaper times, either via solar, solar gain, solar generation, or by using off-peak power, it made sense for us 'cause it just, that just lets you time shift.
So you basically, it means that we never, ever pay for peak power, ever. [00:02:00] That's good. And we'll get back to the actual start of the process. How did you actually decide... A lot of people say, you know, how do I find someone I can trust and all that sort of thing. How did you actually g- come around to your decision process to find someone?
I used My Solar Quotes, which was just an online platform, and just purely from a kind of a, I don't know, just kicking some tires kind of perspective to start with, and then that gave us three, three companies came back to us. One was Harrison's, another was Tū Mai Rā, and then another was an Auckland outfit.
And of the three of them, the Auckland outfit, as soon as I realized they were remote, I was less interested in working with them because they were just gonna subcon- subcontract it out to somebody. And then they made the classic mistake of sending me someone else's, like, quote and someone else's invoice.
I was like, "Nah, not those guys." And then Tū Mai Rā, they were really good. So they came round and the guy that we talked to was really passionate about solar, and same thing for Harrison, Harrison [00:03:00] Solar. In the end, it came down to, I mean, either one of them would've been fine. How'd the actual install go?
'Cause obviously there's- There was a lot, it was a long process for us. So for us, because our house was an older house, we had to first replace our roof, which I think when you're going to install solar, it's worthwhile looking at where in your, where in your roof's life s- cycle it actually is. 'Cause you don't really wanna put solar up there, which is gonna be there for 25 years, and then realize, oh, I've gotta replace my roof in 10 years.
So we had to do our roof, so that had to happen first. And then once we did that, then Harrison's came around and installed it. They subcontracted the install out to a local electricity comp- lo- local electrician, electricians, and those guys are pros. They're really, really good, very conscientious, did a really great job of installing everything.
And even so much to s- as, as to, so that when the, the network man came around, netw- the[00:04:00]
network electrician came around to actually, to, to turn our solar on, he was, he, as soon as he knew it was those guys, he was just kind of like, "Nothing for me to do here." So the install was pretty straightforward really. It just took time, 'cause it took a long time for us to get our roof replaced. But as soon as that was done, the install Was done in two days Oh, yeah.
And what's the sort of like maybe top three things people should be asking, asking maybe themselves before they sign up? With w- w- what the usage pattern is like really. So, you know, if they're, when are they using most of their power? Can they time shift any of their kind of usage? So that's stuff like can you put your dishwasher on in the daytime to make use of the solar when it's been generated.
I would also r- recommend, like one of the biggest things that we found when we first did our solar that we didn't actually install at the time, that I recommend to everybody, is to put a, a timer on your hot water cylinder so that you ... What we do is we turn our hot water cylinder off from about 5:00 in the evening, and it turns on again at about 10:30 in the morning.
So that it, it functions as another battery, so that we use the solar [00:05:00] power in the daytime to heat our hot water, and then it stays hot overnight. That's with four people having showers and baths. Never run out ever. And we just had a cheap timer, and it's just a great way to reduce the energy demand in the evening.
So how long have you actually had the whole system running now? Oh, about 13 months. And have you achieved that goal of no, no- Bill? Not entirely. I think it would average out across the year to be no bill. And because in the wintertime the solar gain is less, of course, and then you get rain, you get like a rainy day or something like that, and then you might start to use more power.
But that is offset by the summertime when you have a lot of export gains. So I think at the moment my peaks at the moment being late August, sunny day, the peak output we'll get from our system will be about five kilowatts, whereas in the summertime will be the full eight kilowatts, and that makes quite a difference in terms of how much you export.
So in the daytime, in the summertime, our hot water cylinder's charged up by 11:00 o'clock, and so all the power that we [00:06:00] then use just switches to export. And so at that time we built up a, a very big credit with our, our, with our power company, and then that, we used that credit essentially to pay for our winter power.
I should say we're in sunny Tauranga for those who wanna know for location purposes. Yes, that, that does help. It does help that our house is also a north-westerly facing house and we get baked in the afternoon sun. And how many solar panels have you actually got on your roof, Dale? I've got 16 REC Alpha RX 460 solar panels, and I've got a GivEnergy hybrid system, which has got a five kilowatt inverter with a 9.5 kilowatt of battery storage.
For my, my panels, the most I've seen the out- them output has been about 7.8 kilowatts. That's on like a bright, sunny summer's day, and at that point you really have to be using as much power in your house as what you possibly can be to get that level of output, otherwise it gets limited by the, the inverter.
What about the inverter? I mean, could you explain that a bit? Yeah. Well, at, at the time we, our inverter is just a five kilowatt [00:07:00] inverter, and that was fine because at that point in time the export limits were set at five kilowatts. That changed recently to 10 kilowatts, so you can export more. And in hindsight I would've, have had a, if had, had have known that I would've got a 10 kilowatt inverter 'cause then I could've exported our full eight kilowatt generation.
But that, that's all right. It's just one of those things you, at the time we didn't know. But, and it's certainly not worth replacing it, but if we replaced it when it we- wears out or has a fault or whatever that is, then I'd, I'd put in a 10 kilowatt inverter. And any, any sort of things that haven't gone quite so well on the, in, on the journey?
The biggest one has been is that the, the, the hardware that we bought, which is GivEnergy, which is a UK hardware provider, that company that made, makes those batteries and inverters has actually gone into receivership in the UK. And so because of that, there's n- there's no manufacturer-based warranty for our equipment, and they even want to start to charge perhaps for using our app, which is to, is to manage our solar.
So that's something to [00:08:00] kinda be aware of is that whoever the supplier is, they may well go out of business and then you're kind of out of, out of warranty. So I think that certainly helps to- Try and choose an es-, a very big established brand if possible for your home. At the time we tossed up between Itinergy and Tesla, but at that time it was peak Elon Musk kind of toxic man.
And so we, we, we as a family were like, "This n- we just don't want anything to do with Elo- Elon Musk," and so we refused to have any Tes- Tesla gear in our house. And the, the guy from Harrison's he said, he, he basically said he couldn't, he couldn't give it away at that point in time anyway. Now it'd be probably a little bit different.
Yeah, now it'd be different. Yeah. Yeah. And, and how have you actually found the, like the battery? Would you recommend people get the battery if they can afford it? Absolutely. 'Cause it just means that even so you can, A, it stores your solar in the daytime, and also say in the wintertime as well, the way we set it up, we've set it up so that it'll charge overnight using on low power rates.
So as I said before, you never, with the battery, you never ever have to [00:09:00] pay for peak power. So for us, with a family of four, like in the summertime, if we come home, like we use a, we've got a, we've got a ducted heat pump system in our house, which I think is rated at about 14 kilowatts or some crazy amount.
But we can, we can run that in the afternoons full bore, cool our whole house using the solar in the afternoons, and then when the sun goes down in the summertime, just the battery for a couple of hours and we... And even, even after doing that, we've still got sort of 50% of the battery left. And then at the moment in the wintertime, same as the opposite, so we just use the solar to charge the battery in the day, or if there's not enough solar gain, the battery's set up to charge in the afternoon, again using off-peak just for an hour just to top it up.
And then that runs our, runs our oven, runs our heat pumps, heating, et cetera, until we go to bed. And that's always, it never runs out. So again, same thing that's all, all charged up with either a low power, low off-peak power or solar power. So essentially we're never paying for that [00:10:00] peak power. We don't have an EV at the moment, but if, it would certainly, I could see the benefits if we did have an EV.
What have been the, say the biggest positives and maybe the biggest downside overall now? I think that the biggest positive is just being that we're kind of free to use as much power essentially as we like with impunity, really. And- Does it feel a bit weird now? You sort of go over to the AC and go, "Oh, I don't have to worry about that so much."
Is it? Yeah, yeah, it does. Um, because at a previous house we had a fire, which of course was kind of different, so we'd, you know, you'd just use wood. And then having our, um, when we first got a heat pump, we didn't have the solar installed and it, it chewed through some, it chewed some pretty astronomical power bills before we got the solar installed.
But as soon as we got that solar installed, those power bills, it was down to w- it was a negative. Yeah, we, the power company owed us, so that, that was a great, great decision. I guess the d- negative would be the, the It'll, it'll be the s- yeah, the b- the battery. W- It's just the, the negative for us is just, of course, having no warranty now, and then also perhaps the software support for the app that we configure [00:11:00] our solar system may well disappear.
And if that's the case, we'll have to use, like, an open source one, but that's okay. I'm fairly, I'm fairly tech- technically capable, like I can handle that. But someone who's not, they wouldn't want to be doing that, so that's definitely a negative. Another positive I think as well is that, is that with the apps, et cetera, you get really
You become really knowledgeable about how your p- your household actually uses power, and it actually also makes you start to try and conserve power a little bit more, 'cause you try to went, "Oh, I mean, I can actually just time shift my hot water or I can, or time shift my, my dishwasher, et cetera, into the daytime."
Yep, so you become more aware of how you can actually just shift your usage around to, to save yourself money. And is there anything you would've done differently? I would've probably ins- if I ... At the time, I w- I would ... I tossed up installing more panels, and it always comes down, of course, to the budget really what we had.
I mean, at the time I think we paid around about 23,000 for our sy- entire system, and we kind of, we probably, we could've afforded to do more, [00:12:00] but kind of I was being a tight ass really and didn't Just didn't want to spend any more. But in hindsight, having probably another four panels would've been nice just for the days when it's light raining, because it just increases your solar, solar generation on those off days.
Yeah. Yeah. And then a bigger inverter, but at, yeah, at the time there was, yeah, I had no idea. Yeah, it was 'cause it was sort of, you start going down the rabbit hole and there's so many different opinions, and people are asking, "Is this, are these people good?" Or, "Do I need this or do I need that?" So it gets a bit, it's a bit hard to get sort of a clear answer.
Yeah, I think, well, I think one thing we didn't install at the time was the, the timer on our hot water system. I think there was, at the time there's a couple of options. Using one called a, I think it's a Geni or a s- I think it's like that. But it's about $1,000 to install one of those. And, but they, they really give you really detailed kind of like control over where you use power within your house and versus just a simple timer, which is what we ended up installing in the end.
And all that does is just turn our hot water on and off, but [00:13:00] we should have done that from the start, from the start. 'Cause once we had the, once we had our power going and I could kinda monitor it and see what was happening with our power usage, we really noticed that in the evenings that the, our hot water cylinder would turn on and then it would draw sort of three kilowatts no matter what.
And that's quite a big chunk of power to be pulling out of your battery and, and your solar gain in the evenings into. And if you turn your hot water cylinder off, then you can just use that elsewhere. And how, how long is it gonna take you to recover the cost of the, uh, your investment into solar and the battery?
Well, our, our power bill when we, before we had the solar and before we had our heat, ducted heat pump, we had, we had no heating. We were running oil heaters. Old school. Old school, right. And I think our power bill, the first month's power bill was something like $600, 'cause we moved in in, into our house in July or June.
And the next one when we had our heat pump, it dr- reduced it but it was still 450 or something like that. So that's what we would've been using if we had no, no power, no, no, no solar, no battery over the [00:14:00] winter. At the moment, our power bill is about 160 in the wintertime, so that's the big drop. In the summertime, with our heat pump for cooling and stuff, even doing that our power bill's negative.
We end up exporting about 100 to $200 a month in power. So it kind of evens out really. So you're just sending it back? We're sending it back into the network, yep, as much as you possibly can. Do you have to sort of fill out a form for that? Uh, yes. So that's when you get connected you have to... Your solar provider should do that for you, yeah.
They'll handle that for you, and you just, you just have to let the, the network know that you're going to become a supplier or an exporter, and the process is different depending on what network that you're on. So we're on Powerco here, and I heard rumors that they were gonna be really slow in, in setting us up and connecting us to the network, but they weren't.
They were really quick. It took about two weeks. That's good. Someone thinking about installing solar or [00:15:00] battery, what advice would, what advice would you give them before they get quotes or sign anything? I would just say do it. It's, if you've got the money, it's really worthwhile just to... I mean, power prices, I think power prices went up by 8% last year.
So far this year they've gone up by 6%. I think you'd have to be living in a fool's paradise to think they're ever gonna reduce or not go up by that amount. So each year with those power price increases, it just means you're not paying it, your investment just pays off faster and faster and faster. I think for us, we're looking at about a six-year return on our investment, which is amazing really.
Do you know, I think they sort of say seven, don't they? Roughly around seven or eight mark, depending on- Yeah, they do. Yep. Yep. But I, I think it's gonna, it'll be quicker for us based off our power usage and the way that our power bill has reduced since we've had solar. In a basic sort of dumbing it down for dummies- Not saying my listeners are.
I'm just I'm more, more for me. More for me. More for me. For me. Um, the sun comes out, a solar [00:16:00] panel brightens up the day, and then when the sun goes down, you use, you use your battery for the power. Yeah, generally. Yep. Yep. So we get sort of meaningful solar gain in the summertime at about sort of 8:30 in the morning.
In the wintertime that's more around about sort of 10:00 AM, which, when it gets up to about, it's generating about a kilowatt in the wintertime. By that time, sort of like 10 o'clock in the morning, on, in the summer it's usually about three or four kilowatts, and then from then it just carries on up through the day.
Charges all, charges the battery all day long and stores all that power, and then, you know, we, we use that in the afternoon or evenings to run all of our house's electricity. And more often than not, we've got battery charge left over. Um, but if not, the battery's set to charge up overnight using off-peak power so it's cheaper so that we've got another battery in, fully charged in the morning to use that stored off-peak power, and then the cycle repeats.
A- and if you didn't have the battery, you'd be using obviously a lot more of electricity out of the grid. Oh, fa- far more. Would be stuck using peak power in the grid at those peak [00:17:00] times, 'cause, you know, in the win- wintertime when there's no solar at all, at 5:30, then you're just stuck using peak power.
Whereas we manage to, you know, store or charge a battery for free in the day and then we can use it in the evening when otherwise we'd be paying premium. Okay. Anything, I think anything else, Dale? I think that's pretty much covered off the- Yeah, I mean, for us, I just... There's a lot of, there are a lot of solar installers around.
Just try and choose a company which has got a good reputation and uses equipment with a fairly robust warranty. And get a few quotes first. Yeah, get the quotes. And you, I mean, you can use that My Solar Quotes or just contact pretty much any ele- electricians or any electrical company now as a solar supplier.
But yeah, just, just, just shop around. Okay, thank, thank you, Dale. We'll leave it with that, and happy solar usage. Thanks. It's my pleasure. Thank you.