i've been in this area all my life this is a different property that we've purchased used
to live on fox island which is 12 k's away i ended up, selling to a neighbour and purchasing this area
50 acres here 20 hectares just a bare paddock when we first moved here 14 years ago and why would you
want to move away from the creek it's beautiful love it . we decided to go solar because our
power bills are just getting out of control we don't use that much power in the house we have
got a free phase workshop which we do a bit of fabricating a bit of engineering out of it but
trying to cut down on our power use really just because of the price of it we ended up putting a
pool in for the grandkids which use a fair bit of power and we checked out a few companies a
couple of them come around and checked out what we wanted and where we wanted to go with the solar
originally we were going to mount them on a shed one of the companies come out and spend a bit of
time with us and checked it right out check the size of the power leads running back from the
meter to the house to the sheds and they worked out that they couldn't supply the power back to
the meters so vinnie contact us at solargain back at the start of 2020 we booked him in to
come out and go through all the pros and cons of going solar he had a fair few sheds and options
that he was looking at possibly from what he had seen friends and family put solar on we had Bryn
come out he was checking out from the transformer to the meter box from the meter box back to the
house then from the house to the shed and we were checking out the sizes of the cable underground
and he worked out that it wouldn't be able to supply the power back to the meter so this is why
we went the ground mount i'm really happy with it really love it on this project we've decided
to use the SolarTerrace 2 (PVezRack) which is a really good rigid rate solution for ground mount and
the support that we have got from Clenergy all throughout the whole process of installing this
one as far as engineering design tech support know how set up degrees is just next level , Clenergy
have been fantastic with helping out on that and they've got the best engineering that we can find
in australia that we have come across and that's why i've always been super happy to use Clenergy
vinnie came to me with 12 months of power bills and i had a really good look at all through
those and all these loads that are here on site everything that he uses for irrigation we've come
up with a 20-kilowatt solar system to supply the demand um at its peak loads and that's going to
provide excess as well which in the future once he converts the farm to off-grid it'll be enough pv
to supply those batteries and charge them and be able to run in full off-grid mode we chose
the pump shed to install the Fronius Symo inverter purely because it's right next to the array we've
got the metering right here as well and we've got all the pumps and the supply to the house
so it just turned out a really good location for it it's inside it's out of the weather
it's going to prolong its life even more the way they've been engineered you just can do so
many different things with them they've got really really good monitoring that's a very
very good app for the customer to be able to look at and understand exactly what's going on
we're finding that you know we've nearly got customers saving a further 20 percent just
because they can read that up quite well um and Fronius have just absolutely nailed that
um from a consumer point of view you've got to save money somewhere
and it was the best way i could see like i could really see our power bills getting out of control
and we had to run them back somehow and that was the best way we could think of
so we chose Jinko solar panels to use on this project purely because of the support that we get
the design the knowledge the know-how the updates long warranties with the return on investment for
the customer he's looking at four year payback period with a panel that's performance warranty
of 25 years so it's going to pay for itself and last a very long time with the cell technology and
the outputs that we're getting out of these panels have been really good and we're really happy with
that and this return on investment is above what our estimate was which is great and we want to
see that so the reason why we chose ground mount over a roof mount here for this property because
it's rural you've got so much land room you can add on it's a unique power system it's totally
separate to the house yes it's a little bit more expensive but all of a sudden you've got a full
structure and your own power plant and i feel this is the way as australia we need to be moving
and if you ever have any problems with your house you want to put a new roof on you haven't got the
solar panels in the way so two years ago we came out to the guinnesses and we saw them
having power bills of over# 6000 so we've installed a 20-kilowatt solar system here
and now we're seeing $1600 power bills um the saving of the four to five grand it's it's really
big like times are getting tough fuel's going up everything's costing us a fortune these days
fertilizer and yeah it just pays a lot of bills and we're getting away with it that way
wife does all the book work and does all that but yeah i'll get the side effects from her