Barilla Solar | Solar Water Heating

This is the most frequently asked question by any customer considering any renewable technology. What they want to know is how long will it take to repay their capital investment based on the energy savings that a system will offer them. Inevitably this is not a simple question with a straightforward answer.

Talking to most customers, they seem reasonably satisfied if they can achieve a payback period in less than 10 years. The simplest way to calulate payback (ignoring the effects of interest rates) you will need to understand how much energy the system you are installing will save the customer in unburned fuel and a prediction of future energy price inflation. Of course we can't know exactly what energy is going to cost in the future, but a reasonable forecasting method would allow for a spread of constant annual increases at various percentages from 5%-30%.

Of course the simplest way to enhance the payback period is to be able to offer systems at a competitive and affordable price to everyone.

Yes, by virtue of the Solar Keymark certification both our on-roof flat-plate and evacuated tube systems will qualify your domestic customers for a grant, assuming the equipment is installed by an accredited MCS company.

There are three requirements in order to offer your customers the reduced 5% VAT rate on solar installations:

• Your business will need to be VAT registered
• The equipment that you are installing should be to heat a domestic system
• You have supplied and installed all of the equipment

Check with HMRC or your Accountant if you are uncertain when to apply the reduced rate.

Yes, the more relevant information you can tell us about a project the higher degree of assistance we can offer. It is probably worth calling us for some advice if you uncertain about what sort of information we will need. Once we have all of the information we can prepare a Polysun simulation of the project to predict annual solar yields and energy savings, from this point we can then produce a schematic and quotation to enable you to build a proposal.

No, we are purely wholesalers of solar thermal equipment. We do not want to enter into direct competition with our own customers so have kept away from offering an installation service.

We would be delighted to do this assuming that you are MCS accredited, are reasonably local to the customer and that we have conducted a satisfactory trading relationship over a period of time.

No. We believe the best way to keep our costs down and to dedicate our time to offering technical help to our customers is to operate on a pro-forma basis with the goods being paid for as they leave our warehouse. This has worked well with our existing customers over the last few years, and means that from the outset everybody knows where they stand.

We can if the project is large enough, typically over 5kW, although we do not carry stock and do not advertise pricing. If you have a particular project in mind it may be worth a quick chat to establish if we can help.