Solar installed by OVO? We’d love to hear from you

Do ovo installers work with roofers at all? our timbers are starting to rot and the entire roof structure needs to be replaced, doing solar and roof together makes a lot of sense to me.

It would be nice to take advantage of the high export costs by going with ovo but our roof cannot handle the added weight, ideally we want integrated panels as its all got to be done anyway and can’t really find out much information, I’m assuming this is standard installs only offered?

Hi @stead,

I asked our installation team, and they said that they don’t currently offer integrated panels. You’re right that it would be a standard installation. They’ve asked if you can let us know what roof tiles you are looking at. They can let you know which ones are solar-compatible. 

If you have any other questions, let us know and keep us updated on your solar journey! You will have much to consider when doing such a massive project. Have you thought about changing the pitch of your roof to maximise the coverage of any panels that will be installed? 😊

We have had a solar and battery installation for 3 months installed by OVO using Givenergy hardware. 

All is working as expected. 

We are currently using Battery Boost successfully to charge up overnight.  

However until Charge Anytime and Battery Boost can be made to work alongside each other we will hold off purchasing  an EV.

I also have several questions relating to Battery Boost that OVO's solar team seem unable to answer. These relate to how the rebate is calculated. I am unable to reconcile the amount of rebate as compared with the usage logs generated by the Givenergy Gateway. 

I should probably put together a longer post in case others can glean from our mixed - but overall positive - experience. Our installation was in August 2024. We already have one EV (and a hybrid). So we had a 5kwH battery, a gen 1 inverter from GivEnergy and 9 panels, plus an existing Hypervolt Charger. At first it was hard to get a sense of what was working well and what wasn’t. Early realisation was we should have gone for a big battery to make use of different tariffs; we are on Economy 7. It was also difficult to get to grip with the app and online energy portal but there are countless YouTube videos and other sources of guidance, almost too many in fact. 
After some months it became clear that we were not getting the expected returns on investment. We then met Big Problem number One. Who do you call? To cut a very long story short, you contact your installer in the first instance. Here OVO very helpful in chasing up and helping overcome much attempted buck-passing. When GivEnergy sent an engineer to check, he found a major issue that was caused by a botched installation that included a screw through a critical cable. The inverter was replaced and we saw an immediate improvement that resulted in remarkably low electricity costs throughout summer into autumn and healthy SEG payments. 

A mixed experience with many terrible lows and some highs. Early adopters bear the brunt of inexperienced installers and “iffy” quality control so it does help to use a go-between to act as advocate and champion. The support from our manufacturer fell well short of what I think should be expected and having the insurance of a third party until we reach a point where we can act as the intelligent customer with confidence cannot be over-estimated.

Hey ​@Phlash,

Thanks for sharing your experience!