Was putting solar panels on our house a good idea?

Adam Bradbury

26 May 2011

Gardeners, farmers and car-washers of the south east of England - you have me to thank for making it rain today.

Because this week we installed solar panels on our house.

We did this in the full knowledge of two things:

1. Our family is unlucky with electrical things.
2. We can make it rain.

On the electrics - in fact it's more than luck. It's a kind of superpower. You name it, we can make it go wrong just by looking at it. The DAB radio flickers like a strobe. Watches race forwards. Battery-driven toys go backwards. We've offered the washing machine repair guy a camp bed to save him commuting to our place. Stuck permanently in the CD player is an album whose name I'm not prepared to share with you. The oven turns itself on at midnight.

On the weather - wherever we roam we bring the rain. We're famous for it among our friends. None of them have been on holiday with us for a decade - not since we actually made it snow in the south of Spain in April.

So with London and the south east labouring under a long spell of dry weather, we invoked these superpowers, borrowed some money from the Cooperative Bank and asked Joju Solar to install panels on our roof to generate electricity from the sun.

The installation took less than two days. They switched us on at 4 pm on Tuesday and by the end of yesterday we'd produced a whopping 17.5 kWh. That's enough to, well, apparently that's enough full stop. Now it's Thursday and it's raining.

Still, I'm taking great comfort from two things.

First, that we've made it rain - and although some people might still think that's miserable for May, more and more of us are coming around to the idea that rain is actually a good thing in the right quantities. And that changing weather patterns are worrying signs of things to come if we let climate change get out of hand.

Second, I know that once half term is out of the way and we're all back in the classroom or office the sun is bound to come out again. And at that point, as I'm thumping the telly, or trying to work out whether I'm listening to Braids at the right speed, or wondering why the lasagne is un-cooking, I'll be doing it knowing that the power is coming from the sun - not from some fossil fuel furnace.

And that I'm getting paid for it, and will go on getting paid for it for the next 25 years.

Adam Bradbury, Publishing & New Media Team