Are solar panels worth it?
The honest answer depends on how much electricity you use while the sun is shining. These figures come from metered data for households who actually installed solar.
What the numbers look like
| Improvement | Typical saving | Grant |
|---|---|---|
| Loft insulation | £37 a year | — |
| Solid wall insulation | £200 a year | — |
| Solar panels | £160 a year | — |
| Cavity wall insulation | £140 a year | — |
| Air source heat pump | £110 a year | £7,500 |
These are averages, not your home
Everything above describes a typical property of this kind, using published energy certificate statistics. Your own figures will differ — often substantially, since floor area alone varies by a factor of three between areas.
We cannot price most of this work: there is no published cost dataset we can stand behind for insulation or heat pumps, so the savings above come with no payback. How we work these out.