What the October price cap means for your bills

Ofgem's cap goes up again on 1 October. It's a 4% rise, which works out at roughly £1,723 a year for a typical household paying by direct debit, up about £60 on where it's been since July (Ofgem's announcement is here).

We get a lot of calls in the fortnight after one of these announcements, so it seems worth writing down what we usually end up explaining on the phone.

The cap isn't a cap on your bill

This one catches nearly everyone. The cap doesn't limit what you pay. It limits the rate you're charged per unit, along with the standing charge.

What lands on your doormat is that rate multiplied by the number of units you've bought, plus the standing charge. Which means there are only two levers: the rate, and the number of units. You've no control over the first one.

So what do panels actually do

They don't take you off the grid, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

While there's daylight on the roof, the panels cover whatever the house is drawing at that moment. Fridge, freezer, router, the washer if it's on. Whatever you generate and don't use goes back out to the grid, and your supplier pays you for it, though usually a fair bit less than you pay to buy it back.

That gap is why batteries took off. Instead of exporting your generation at lunchtime for pennies and buying it back at teatime at the full rate, you hang onto it. Most households use the bulk of their electricity between about five and nine in the evening, when the panels have already knocked off for the day.

What it's worth, we can't tell you from here

Not without seeing the roof, anyway.

It depends which way the roof faces and how steep it is. South is the textbook answer, but plenty of east-west roofs do well once there's a battery involved. It depends on shading, whether that's your own chimney, a neighbour's extension or the sycamore next door. It depends on whether anyone's in during the day. And it depends on what you're paying now.

Any MCS accredited installer has to give you an estimated annual generation figure for your actual property, worked out to the MCS standard, before you commit to anything. If someone quotes you savings before they've been up and had a look, they've made it up.

Small roofs count

There's an assumption that solar power is only for detached or semi-detached houses, and only in places that get a lot of sunlight.

Neither's true. Panels run on daylight, not heat or direct sun, so they generate on a grey Lancashire day as well, just less than in June.

We were on a mid-terrace in Blackburn last week. Five panels, a 3.6kW inverter and a 5.76kWh battery, and we were off site the same day. Estimated generation is somewhere around 1,700kWh a year. It's not a big system by any stretch, but it's a roof a lot of people would have assumed wasn't worth bothering with.

The paperwork's ours, not yours

Every job we do, we handle the MCS certification and the DNO side registering the system with the network operator, which is also what makes you eligible for export payments. Customers don't need to touch any of it.

We're MCS, NAPIT and RECC accredited. We came at these as electrical engineers before anything else, so we tend to think about how a system sits alongside the electrics you've already got, rather than how many panels we can fit.

If you're mulling it over

Solar suits a lot of houses round here. It doesn't suit all of them, and we'd rather say so than take your money. A survey costs you nothing and you'll get a proper generation figure out of it either way.

We're based in Barnoldswick and cover Lancashire and Yorkshire, Preston, Burnley, Clitheroe, Skipton and everywhere in between.