We were very keen to put on a solar battery to backup our solar panels. And it was a way of obviously using solar electricity into the night time to contribute to the greater picture, to even out the peaks and troughs because there's a lot of people taking on solar panels. But I do like the idea of generating power close to the source and using it where we are, and using the battery to sustain things through the evening for our local use and for moving to the whole grid.

We've put on high quality panels with this latest installation, and they've been very good. Our first lot of panels we did in about 2008, and they weren't nearly as efficient as the newer ones. So we've moved those to a less good part of the roof, we've put our best panels in the best sun spot. And yeah, it's been really, really impressive, how much we make even on a grey day. As so many people say that panels don't work when the sun's not up, we can see that actually on a grey day, even on a wet day, we are actually producing quite a lot of power. And it's really, really impressive. Really thrilled. I do like the way we can now also check the output of our panels through the apps, which we weren't able to do with the beginning panels. So we can see they actually perform very well.

We particularly wanted to get a local company that we knew would have to have a good reputation locally. So, it was good to have somebody come to your house and do a quotation, look at your situation. They're very consultative. They asked what we wanted every step of the way. They did very neat and worked extremely hard, and it looks very good on our little cottage as well. And I liked the fact that actually the battery and solar installation is quite visible, so I can share it with friends and visitors and say, look, this actually works.