There was a piece in the papers here in Sweden during the week about how IKEA are now selling PV panels in the UK. According to IKEA's figures the average payback period in the UK is now 8 years.

So I just had a look at the ikea.co.uk website and they are selling in partnership with another company Hanergy, "Ikea family" members get a 15% discount. I clicked through to their online calculator and the results it gave were utter rubbish. It reckoned that a south facing 3.84kWp array at 45deg pitch in central Edinburgh would produce over 7000kWhrs a year. PVGIS reckons on 3400kWhrs which is much more believable.

It would be interesting if others tried this also for their actual locations to see if it was just a single bad result or a calculated attempt to suck people in.

N.B. The online calculator won't let you see the result until you input Name, telephone and email address. I just used nonsense values for all, Fred Bloggs will be getting a lot of sales calls later today!

Ikea's start page for solar panels can be found here.

http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/campaigns/solar-panels.html

Had a chance to test this a little more.

It has only been throwing up rogue results for Edinburgh for whatever reason.

Testing in 4 or 5 other locations around the UK I got estimated yearly outputs of between 3400 and 3700kWhrs from a 3,84kWp array but choosing another different address in Edinburgh again gave a prediction of 7100kWhrs/a from a 3.84kWp array.