Mr. Julien Buralli, a French professional working in tourism, explains that he has always wanted to have solar power, even more so while living in a country with plenty of solar radiation.

So he decided to hire David Waters to help him with the election and installation of a solar energy system that would best suit his needs. He chose to have an interactive system: solar panels, battery bank and inverter operating independently, off-grid, with the possibility to connect to it.

Interactive systems work both with and without the electric grid. They are more expensive because they need to have batteries to store energy since they lack the ability to inject the surplus electricity into the grid, such as is the case for grid-tied systems.

“We connect to the grid from 4 pm to 9 pm,” clarifies Mr. Julien Buralli, “because the batteries don’t have enough capacity for this time frame, but since we started having our own solar energy installation, our electricity bill has never exceeded 5,000 colones per month, when it always used to be about 35,000. “

At his 3 bedroom home in Quepos, where 5 people live permanently, energy has been home generated for the last 3 years. The sun is running a fridge, several TVs, 2 ceiling fans and a coffeemaker. A bank of 4 batteries accumulates the energy that isn´t consumed and the PV system always continues to operate even during outages of the public grid so he always has electricity.

“As the price of batteries is high, this type of system is more expensive and I have calculated that I’ll have a return on my investment in about 20 years, but as the price of electricity is rising constantly, this could even happen sooner. Furthermore I just prefer to consider my investment as a gesture towards environment. Besides that, I have received an excellent after sales service because Mr. Waters calls me often to see if everything is still working OK and I have been ensuring him for 3 years already that we are not having any trouble at all. “