On Feb 26, 9:39*pm, Martin Brown
wrote:
On 26/02/2012 21:16, Andy Burns wrote:

Andrew Gabriel wrote:

"george writes:
What king of device could turn on the power
to an electric storage heater
only when its sunny and my solar panels
are exporting energy to the grid?

Assuming you're on FIT, this is extremely expensive because you
will be losing 43p/unit that you put into your storage heaters,

That's not how it works AFAIK, the 43p is paid for generating it, not
exporting it (there's a small additional payment for that), he could
have solar powered 500W halogens lights in his garden and be paid to run
them while the sun shines...

The FIT is even more barking mad than it seems at first sight then.

Using solar power to drive resistive electric storage heaters should
forfeit all FIT subsidies on the PV electricity used that way!

The daft government produced a system for PV that provides a perverse
incentive not to install the one sort of solar powered water heating kit
that does actually give a decent (well better) true ROI.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

PV panels provide useful power when thermal panels won't.
They are less efficient but the energy they produce can be used for
anything and is more valuble.