u/Organic_Reporter

Buying a house with solar, battery and inverter. Givenergy hardware. Visited the house yesterday for the owner to show us the system, he gave me a printout of Givenergy's instructions to take over ownership of the system. Which involves emailing their support team with evidence of ownership etc

Unfortunately, I have since discovered they've gone into administration and aren't offering customer support, so this email would go unanswered.

Will the solar still work? Can I just set up an import/export with an energy supplier? Or do I need to be able to access the system via an app?

I have been lurking in this sub since we offered on the house, as I have no experience with solar and wanted to know what we're getting into. Solicitor has sent us all the solar related information and I have the MCS certificate which states the estimated annual generation at 3700kWh. Total installed capacity is 4.86kW and declared net capacity as 3.6kW.

To work out how much I'd be saving, do I simply multiply the 3700 by my electricity unit rate of 17.5p? If so that's about £650 a year, which is pretty good. I'm with British Gas at the moment and I can see their export rate is 15p, so I'd be better off using it all than exporting it, but I imagine that's easier said than done!

I feel like it may be more complicated though, because there's a 5kW battery (and an EV charger, but we don't have an EV) and I've read about people having variable rates where energy is cheaper at night so they can load shift and store energy. I think the sellers are currently with Octopus, though I'm not sure it matters.

I may be overthinking this and should probably just wait and see how it all works when we move in, but I'd like to understand the system and try to get on an appropriate supplier tariff from the start. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.