In this piece, published in May, and which was one of our most-read pieces of 2023, Viv Vermaak describes her travails with installing solar electricity at her home.
You know that long whistle a mechanic makes when he looks at your engine while he slowly shakes his head? The mournful eye contact as they inform you of the death of your dearly departed bank balance? Well, mechanics might have started this ritual, but rooftop solar installers perfected it.
And these guys operate without that great playing field leveller – grease – so their hands are clean. They are clinical, patronising and have that ruthless air of superiority knowing they can charge anything they want because South Africans are desperate. Fasten your seatbelts, if you are considering solar, you are in for a bumpy ride.
Firstly, take off the rose-tinted glasses. Solar has been romanticised and oversold. Most people, including myself, bought into the fairy tale that solar is clean and cheap, saves money and the environment and is a complete solution. Nope, not even close.
A more realistic expectation is to anticipate hybrid solutions that you complement with gas or petrol options. If you, like me, simply won’t tolerate being dragged down by load shedding or the frequent 5-day outages we have experienced in my area, also be prepared to pay more.
I share now some insights and caveats after two years with a rooftop solar system. I am an entry-level buyer, so I am reporting back from the perspective of a middle-class earner with a personal and psychological home need. I paid R55,000 for a ±5KVA solar system geared for a single person. I have an inverter, Lithium Ion battery and 6 panels. I got it relatively cheap.
Lesson 1: Solar is not a one-to-one replacement for grid electricity in terms of output
Solar is not a direct replacement for ‘Eskom,’ coal-operated systems or nuclear systems. It is bad at handling heat-generating appliances. My system won’t handle a stove, a tumble dryer, a geyser, or power tools like welding irons. I cannot use the kettle and the microwave at the same time, for instance. It is not as simple as just flicking a switch with solar. You have to plan activities ahead to avoid pulling too many Amps at a time. So I have a dual Eskom/solar system.
I use Eskom for the stove and the geyser. I also supplement this with a 5KVA petrol generator (bought six years ago on special at R8 000) because the sun does not always shine for three days in a row, an obvious fact many people forget about. 5KVAs from petrol can handle everything the solar system can plus more. It runs power tools and the tumble dryer at the same time. But it is messy, noisy, smelly, and leaky and all the cables drive me mad. You also have to babysit it, in terms of keeping track of it and switching it on and off, whereas solar systems can automatically regulate their output via the converter (in theory).
Lesson 2: You won’t ‘save’ on your electricity bills
My electricity bill averaged around R1 500 a month. It has indeed gone down, BUT for me to show a true saving I will have to subtract the R55,000 I paid for the saving in the first place. Any true financial benefit will only kick in after three to five years, which is often the warranty on some of the items, even though they promise 10 years of usage. Be cautious of the braggarts at the water coolers who loudly proclaim they pay ‘nothing’ for electricity and are living off-grid for free. If you paid over R350 000 (which is a good price) to install an off-grid solar system it is not really ‘free’ is it, poepol? You can argue it is ‘worth it’, but it is not ‘free.’
Steel yourself to be irritated by people who claim they ‘only paid R3 000 for an inverter’, so they don’t know why you paid so much. These people use their ‘system’ to charge their cell phones for a few hours. It is the same people who think ‘uncapped data’ means unlimited. Ignore them. People exaggerate the output of their systems and underreport how much they paid for it. It’s the opposite of what Real Housewives of Bedfordview do when they discuss their domestic workers.
Lesson 3: Is solar good for the environment?
I fell for this one. It was so cool and romantic to think my house is powered by the sun. I somehow managed to look past the non-biodegradable panels which are made of plastic, metal, silicone and rare metals that are mined using water and traditional coal-based energy sources. In the next few years, we will be dealing with large numbers of lithium ion battery waste by people like me as they upgrade.
And while smaller rooftop installations like mine will solve a personal problem for me, it is not necessarily a solution that can be rolled out nationally. Solar is an expensive process to integrate into the grid. Coal and nuclear solutions might still be more cost-effective and environmentally less damaging as they don’t add additional manufacturing pressures. The nett environmental advantages of solar and wind are also far from proven conclusively.
Lesson 4: The industry is young and booming – it does not have a maintenance budget
The car mechanic of old was a problem solver. He/she could take a nylon stocking and make a fan belt out of it. They could fashion gaskets from cork leather and understood how the parts fitted together. Solar installers can’t McGyver a system. Their business model is to buy the inverters and batteries from wholesalers they get a good deal from, install the apparatus with massive mark-ups and train the labourers to do only that. They are too busy to solve problems and there isn’t an infrastructure in the industry yet to spend time and money on after-sales service, as has happened over the years with plumbing and washing-machine repairs, for instance.
The Consumer Goods and Services Ombud (CGSO) has received more than 200 complaints about solar systems and generators in the past year.
Buckle up, it’s the Wild West out there. Arm yourself with knowledge. And a Plan B and C. That’s the way it goes. Solar is like capitalism: it is a messy, nasty, equal-opportunity system that favours the rich and leaves unfortunate by-products – but it is still better to have it than not.
On a personal note, my battery stopped charging and was going flat overnight all of a sudden. I foresee the nightmare getting it fixed before the winter load-shedding. I can’t get my original installer to recycle my battery or replace it under warranty and I just got a quote from another supplier to replace a single battery for R77 000! You should have heard that guy whistle.
As I typed this last paragraph, my local handyman-turned-solar installer came round to see if he and his son could fix my system.
‘I hope you brought a blob of Prestik and some duct tape,’ I said. ‘That’s the type of solution I need.’
The father-and-son team have operated in the area for years. They fixed my generator and installed my DSTV. The dad’s just one of those guys who loves solving puzzles. Putting on his glasses, he asked for the instruction manual, as he had never worked on this particular type of inverter before. Then he changed some settings on the box, and put it all down on a piece of paper for me. And that’s all it took: a call-out fee, and changing the voltage settings on the charger.
Let’s see how it goes.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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Image by Manfred Antranias Zimmer from Pixabay