So initially the average customer, say eight to 10 years ago, will be primarily wanting to reduce their power bill. We find now a lot of people are coming to us which they want to reduce their carbon footprint. They want to do the right thing for the environment, so it's almost a secondary thing now to lower their power bill. Although it's still a high priority, sort of 50/50 now, so there's a lot of different mindsets with solar. Payback period for the average residential mum, dad, two kids, you're looking at three years for the extra money you have to pay to get a high end quality system. You might have to wait another six months to get that money back, but from there on you've got nothing to worry about. I guess the average homeowner, if there's a bit of indecision around solar, just with the extremely fast payback you're always going to get that money back. Even if you move, you're still going to get that few dollars more for your home with solar on it, even if you don't take advantage of that system and the power savings.
So monitoring is really important to us, five to 10 years ago people just sort of, if you had a green light on your system, that was good enough for some people. But now with the changes in the feed-in tariffs, you need to make sure that not only your system is producing at a certain level, you want to know how much your home is using. With some of the monitored systems that we have installed, you can see how much your solar is producing in real time, and then also see how much your home is using at any one time. So you can start making smart decisions. You might be producing more power and some power is being exported to the grid, so then you're able to use that power, so you can maybe turn on the air cons or start using appliances knowing that you're not going to be using any power from the grid. The other things are electric hot water systems, but the great thing about electric hot water systems is they can be set up to run during the day, so it's absolutely perfect for solar. The other thing is air conditioning. Air conditioning on the weekends, you have people sitting around watching TV, they want to be able to put the air con on. A lot of people don't, purely because of the power bill.
So, having solar allows them to put the air cons on sit back, relax, and not have to worry about bill shock at the end of the quarter.
What are the environmental and financial advantages of a high quality solar power system?
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