[Kevin Sharpe]

My car has a 22kw battery 0.13p x22kw =£2.86 to charge

Battery charging is not 100% efficient so you should probably assume an extra 20% overhead

How much do you think I would save with solar panels?

Is your car at home charging during the day? If so, all day or just part?

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

I use to charge in the day. But it only take about 2/3 hours to charge when I'm at home

Ok, so your question is about investing in home solar not charging directly from it?

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

So I would charge during the day it it would bring my bills down even more

Here's what happened with my Solar PV today...

We generated just under 35kWh in total between 6:30am and 8:00pm.

We exceeded 6A (the minimum charging level defined by the IEC standards) between 8am and 6pm, producing ~30kWh which could have been used to easily charge the ZOE from empty to full

Realistically, you'd probably want to use the middle part of the day to avoid the ZOEs low current charging efficiency issues (fixed in the next version of the car AFAIK).

I would expect the output to exceed this level for much of the next six months so making a major contribution to your driving if your car is plugged in at home during the middle of the day.

My 7kWp system cost £16K in 2012, and had dropped to £12K a year later. I'll be interested to see how far its dropped this year (£10K maybe?).

The solar installers on the forum can talk about current FIT income but IMO solar is just a no brainer for anyone remotely interested in survival of the species

@GBEV made an interesting comment yesterday when he hypothesised that panels are now so cheap on ebay that you could install them yourself for a fraction of the cost of a MSC installer and still make money (you would not qualify for FIT payments if you DIY).

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

With clouds the solar generation goes up and down and so we often end up paying more than if we had charged overnight on Econ7.

Ideally we need the solar inverters and EVSE communicating so that the car charging rate tracks the solar output. We have many of the pieces today and I've been working on a Open Energy Monitor project to demonstrate this in use.

That said, I know that @RickMGoldie just manually selects the relevant charge rate using his DIY EVSE