Serious Price hike on Electricity - adding €200 to annual bill

It's not exactly cheap to do.

You have to mount panels on roof and then pay electrician to run wiring from roof to inverter.

We did it as part of a deep retrofit, and even with grant and zero VAT rate, payback time (with a big assumption the rate paid doesn't fall further) is about 10 years.

Before focusing on solar, reducing usage and diverting as much usage to night rate along with changing suppliers annually are going to give a much better return for no capital input.

I don't use dryer, washing machine or dishwasher unless there is someone in the house awake. I've seen the aftermath of too many appliance fires

so are most people that get solar panels not getting the batteries to store power?

Do you have solar panels and batteries?

A full solar set up doesn't come cheap, many cannot afford the outlay on them. Is it not pretty obvious why people don't have them?

I'm all for solar panels, but doing the laundry between 2am and 6am is a bit much.

That's the benefit of the battery + solar panels so even if there's no sun then you've charged off the night rate so any major usage is using cheap electricity

Having a chat with a neighbour the other night about how much the panels cost me, etc. He said they were too dear for him but he'd think about it. He's a nice bloke but he and his Mrs smoke a fair bit, at least a 20 pack each per day. Cigarettes cost near enough €20 per 20 so that's a minimum of €280 a week. Yes, that's €1100.00 a month. But of course I'm not going to tell them that, even though they tell us our health insurance is crazy too. I'd say there's huge no's of a similar type of families finding it hard to survive, but?

90% of the time you can turn off those beeps. Check the manual or search for the specific model number and "disable beeps"

Ha ha, you need to get up to date with modern appliances, etc.

My wife is a very light sleeper, I doubt she'd accept the washing machine and/or dishwasher running between 11pm and 6am.

My batteries are rated to 8000 charge cycles that is 22 years if fully charged and discharged everyday (which is unlikely to happen everyday 365 days a year). I wouldn't call that wearing out quick.

One of the reasons why electricity is so expensive is due to one-off housing. Maintaining overground power lines costs much more than underground lines due to storm damage - think back to January when that storm knocked out the power for a record number of homes. Someone has to pay for that and the cost falls back on the customers. People living in one-off houses pay a rural tariff on their electricity, but it doesn't cover the full cost, so us urban dwellers are subsidising their overground lines in the form of stealth taxes due to decades of FF/FG incompetence.

Same goes for broadband. Our line rental subsidses their line rental.

That is conspiracy nonsense spread by the anti science/climate change idiots. Mine(dyness) and most others are rated for close to if not more than 20 years lifespan and all have 5/10 year warranties minimum.

Throw up a few screenshots from your solar app showing this degradation. I'm interested as have solar too.