Photovoltaic systems

In most countries this question does not exist: you fit panels, you export the surplus, and that is the end of it. Cyprus has an isolated grid, so the network operator has to balance supply and demand within the island itself. That is why there is more than one way to connect a system here, and why the choice matters more than the panel brand.

The four below cover almost every property. Read the one that sounds like your situation and skip the rest.

Two of them are worth a sentence more. A zero export system is what gets approved where the network will not accept an export connection: the inverter is configured so nothing crosses the meter outward, and the surplus that would have been exported goes into storage instead, which is what makes the design work rather than simply throwing production away. With export off the table the whole calculation is about your own consumption, so oversizing has no upside and the survey matters more here than anywhere else.

Off-grid is a different design problem altogether. There is no grid to fall back on, so capacity is set against a run of poor days rather than against an average, and the design starts from what runs and when rather than from an annual figure. On a remote site it also has to be simple enough to check and service without specialist equipment on every visit.

A solar system produces during daylight. Whatever the house is drawing at that moment is taken from the roof first, and only the shortfall comes from the grid. If the roof is producing more than the house is using, the surplus goes out to the network and is credited to your account.

The credit is the part people misread. An exported unit is not worth what an imported one costs. You are credited at the export rate and billed at the retail rate, and the gap between those two is why the same system can pay back in six years on one house and nine on another with identical panels.

This is the whole reason self-consumption matters. A unit you use as you produce it saves you the full retail price. The same unit exported and bought back later saves you the difference between the two rates, which is a fraction of it.

A battery is not an upgrade to the panels. It changes when you use what they made, and on net billing that is worth real money because the gap between the export rate and the retail rate is exactly what storage recovers.

On the assumptions this guide uses, it lifts self-consumption from roughly 40% to 70%. Where you land inside that depends on how much of your life happens after dark, which is why a battery should be sized from a year of your consumption rather than from the roof.

There is a second reason people buy one, and it is not financial. A battery with a backup function keeps the essential circuits alive through a network outage. Whether that is worth paying for is a household question rather than an arithmetic one.

Payback is the year the cumulative saving crosses what you paid. It is the number everyone asks for and the one most easily misquoted, because it depends on inputs that differ from house to house far more than the hardware does.

Roof orientation and shading set how much the system produces at all. Your consumption pattern sets how much of that production you keep at full value. The connection scheme sets what the surplus is worth. And the electricity price sets what every unit you avoid buying is worth, which is why a rising price shortens payback rather than lengthening it.

What moves it very little: the brand on the panel, within the range of manufacturers worth fitting at all. Two reputable panels of the same output on the same roof produce within a few per cent of each other.

Solar quotations are hard to compare because they look alike: a panel count, a system size, a price and a payback year. The differences that matter are in how those numbers were arrived at, and none of that is visible on the front page of a proposal.

These five questions surface it. They are not a trap and there are no wrong answers, but the answers will differ, and the differences will tell you more than the prices do.

The ones that come up once someone has read this far. The shorter, more practical questions are answered further up the page.