Masters' Microfit Solar Panel Harvesting April 2014 Summary

April 2014 Solar Harvesting Summary Results

April again proved to be a great solar month.  The Polar Vortex kept temperatures below norm which helps your solar panels to produce more energy along with the longer days and improved angle or attitude of the sun in the sky..  We reached a new daily peak of 90.4 kW hrs.  We only had 3 days below 20 kW hrs, two of these days was due to snow and because we were in Florida we couldn't clear the panels.  They cleared with the next days intense sunlight, but it did reduce our overall harvesting. For April, we produced 1.7 MW hrs.  I predicted that 1.7-8 was possible.  With one more great sunny day we would have made it and or if we did not take our 10 day vacation that for safety reasons, we shut down the moving array in case of high winds which did occur on one day. 

Early morning sun saw big changes. The easterly location of the sun rise moved northerly by quite a lot to the point that our north facing bay window gets the early morning sun.  We designed our system to harvest some of this early morning and late day light.  In order to maximize your solar harvesting, you do need to have some east and west facing panels along with your south facing panels.  We did this by building an array on the east and west side of our garage roof and dynamically moving the panels to follow the sun.  These panels now produce 50% more energy than statically east facing panels.  They also produce 20% more than our south facing panels.  We shut down the array for the 10 days that we were on holidays to protect us against high winds.  This was a good idea as with the unexpected snow we also had 45 mph wind gusts.  This was another reason why we didn't reach 1.8 MWhrs.  We do have a sensor for high wind speed but it is not yet connected to the system.

For April we only had 7 days below 20 kWhrs and most days were above 60.  Our monthly average was 57 kW hrs well within our 50-60 kW hrs forecast.  Morning maximum harvesting reached 46-47 kW hrs on a sunny day.

May's Forecast

We will gain an extra hour of sunlight in May and May has 31 days.  Temperatures will remain cool making a 2 MW hrs of harvesting possible.  It always depends on the cloud cover. The sun's attitude will increase by 6.8 degrees to 69.7 degrees.  That means the sun will be perpendicular to the panels on May 22.which will give maximum solar intensity, sky cover willing.  We still have two panels not producing well.  I hope to replace one shortly. I can't stress enough that you must have a panel monitoring system to discover problems like this.  We use SolarEdge Optimizers which prevent total system disasters from occurring.  If we had straight string inverters, we would be producing 40% less power and our system would not work.  

May historically is the best harvesting month due solely to the cooler temperatures.  June should be the best month except for the higher temperatures.  I have thought of using a water mist system to cool the panels but I would need rain water or RO water to do this to prevent hardness spots on the glass and a pump to push the water up the 40 feet to reach the panels.  I might test water cooling out one day with tap water to see if it helps and how much it helps.

NOTE:  Life is Short - Try to Help your neighbours and people in need

Being retired, because of the small income from the Solar Panels, we were able to re-start our support of a child in need from Nicaragua.  If you are better off, please also consider helping those in need though the Christian Children Fund of Canada.

We do not work for Flexible Solar serving Windsor and Southern Ontario.  I do however promote any honest person in their business where I have had the pleasure of working with them.  That is really hard to find in the solar business.  These guys use the best components for a long system life.  You can even ask them for a copy of my engineering specification that you can use to outline the work specification.  I am 100% sure that Mike Holmes would say that is the way to do things to protect yourself.  They also use the best guys out there to install your system.

Do you want to have an extra $60,000 to $100,000 to spend over the next 20 years?

If you have been wondering whether or not to go solar, I strongly recommend that you give

 Steve a call at: 

Steve -519 962 9218

He will give you an honest analysis of your house to see if it is worthwhile to install a microfit solar panel system.  For what we earn, we will payoff our mortgage on our retirement house. We still have to pay utilities and taxes but we are way ahead of where we were and we are lowering the carbon dioxide levels as best as we can.  A basic system will produce about $5,000 per year with straight string inverters.  Stay away from that and go with optimizers.  With a few tweaks, you could produce $6-7000 per year.  I still don't trust microinverters to last much more than 12 years with a horrible replacement cost as they are under the panels. Read all of my posts, starting from the beginning to get a better understanding of solar.

Fun watching the sun.

How the sun keeps changing the angle that it hits our roofs.

I had been waiting for April to arrive so that the sun light would hit our east/west and south panels perpendicular to their orientation.  Our house sits almost perfectly east/west giving us a south facing roof and the garage an east/west orientation.  We do not have the best pitch of our south roof for the winter months. That turned out to help the east west facing panels.

I have watched almost daily to see the sun rise northerly each day at different locations on my neighbours houses.  Early in April I was some what surprised to see the first light coming through our kitchen's bay windows on the north side of our house.  It cast a S-E shadow on the light pole across the street from us. By 8:30 am it had changed to due west and one hour later to N-E.  All of this is good news for our east panels as they start to produce 4 times as much as the early morning south facing panels.  We produce over 4.5 kW by 8:45 am  That is 45% of our maximum 10 kW.  The south shifting direction helps to turn on our main generators which are our south facing panels.  We are trying to maximize our harvesting of solar energy by widening the curve or by grabbing those early morning and late afternoon rays.

The reason that the angle change so much at this time of the day is because we are looking at spherical objects and the path that the sun follows is called a great circle.  We are at 42 degrees N Lat. and the sun never reaches more than 23.5 deg N Lat on 21 June.

The negative impact of our poor roof pitch now has all but disappeared.  An interesting fact which I had over looked is now helping us.  A low pitch roof offers some benefits to east/west facing panels as the east panels harvest energy much later in the afternoon than I originally thought they would.

How is our Dynamic Positioning Array Working? 

Those of you who have been following this post know that we move our east and west panels throughout the day to maximize the harvesting and utilization of our system.  As they are east/west facing we are seeing an approximately 50% increase over statically mounted east panels.  As compared to south facing panels we are seeing a 22% increase. We don't see high power outputs from east/west but we do see it happening for the entire day. All of this is occurring at the peak harvesting time of the year.

Our goal is to maximize our ROI.  We want to bring up the inverter output to near maximum but not over the maximum for as long as possible.  This can be achieved by blending the east and west inputs.  Exceeding the inverter output really only means that we are wasting power.  Some inverter peaking is desirable but to date, little is occurring and is not a problem.

Conclusion; the array is working great and will pay for it self many times over.  Remember, if we can harvest just 1 kW hr more each day, that is 0.5 kW hr in both am and pm we will earn 39.6 cents per day.  Or $144 per year or $2892 over the 20 years.  Now we are talking money and not pennies. In 2014 we pay less than $1400 for our electrical bill.  That 1 kW hr per day will give us 2 years of free electricity.  We are using 21-22 kW hrs per day in our home.  

Remember to check visually for any fouling of your panels.  We feed the birds and they then sometimes leave the food on our panels.  I have not yet had to clean the panels but I am keeping an eye on them.  I am hoping the rain will do that job for me.

NOTE:  Being retired, because of the small income from the Solar Panels, we were able to re-start our support of a child in need from Nicaragua.  If you are better off, please also consider helping those in need though the Christian Children Fund of Canada.  For the small cost of your daily Tim's Coffee you can make a big difference in a family's life.

Do you want to have an extra $60,000 to $100,000 to spend over the next 20 years?

If you have been wondering whether or not to go solar, I strongly recommend that you give

 Steve a call at: 

Steve -519 962 9218

He will give you an honest analysis of your house to see if it is worthwhile to install a microfit solar panel system.  For what we earn, we will payoff our mortgage on our retirement house. We still have to pay utilities and taxes but we are way ahead of where we were and we are lowering the carbon dioxide levels as best as we can.  A basic system will produce about $5,000 per year with straight string inverters.  Stay away from that and go with optimizers.  With a few tweaks, you could produce $6-7000 per year.  I still don't trust microinverters to last much more than 12 years with a horrible replacement cost as they are under the panels. Read all of my posts, starting from the beginning to get a better understanding of solar.

We do not work for Flexible Solar serving Windsor and Southern Ontario.  I do however promote any honest person in their business where I have had the pleasure of working with them.  That is really hard to find in the solar business.  These guys use the best components for a long system life.  You can even ask them for a copy of my engineering specification that you can use to outline the work specification.  I am 100% sure that Mike Holmes would say that is the way to do things to protect yourself.  They also use the best guys out there to install your system.

Review of Heliene's 72 Cell Poly-crystalline 300 W Solar Panels

Review of Heliene's 72 Cell 300 W  Poly-crystalline Solar Panels

The Kortright Ontario solar panel demonstration project was set up to prove that Ontario Manufacturer's could produce excellent solar panels.  It was NOT intended to promote one manufacturer over another. Some wise marketing people saw this as an opportunity to show case their products by any means. Most or all equipment performed well with in normal operating tolerances.  However, an alert marketing manager could select his best panel, burn it in and then send it in for the project. That would give you a false high value.  It would have been much better to randomly select 3-4 panels off of the line and use those.

Heliene's panels did not come out on top.  Our review shows that their performance is of equal quality to all of the other manufacturers.  You can read my earlier comments on how someone might of twisted the Kortright demonstration to their advantage.


We got 5 of these panels to test (not one).  Every panel has a slightly different peak value but their daily harvesting value is close.  If we choose the best one of these 5 panels to talk about, then we would be squewing the results.  We didn't do that.  They were placed on our south facing roof to fill in some gaps.  As we are operating polycrystalline panels - 60 cell type, we are able to extrapolate directly as to their performance. The panels were installed by Flexible Solar of Windsor who also installed our microfit project. These are the best guys out there to deal with.

A bit of information first about these panels.

We were able to get Heliene to ship us these panels in late February for installation in March.  The bad winter delayed install until early April.  The panels have been running for over 2 weeks.  Heliene also  produce a 17.5% efficient panel in the second quarter of 2014 but it is mono-crystalline. That given them a 280 W 60 cell mono solar panel.

I chose these panels as I needed 72 cell panels to help utilize as much as possible my south facing roof. Initial results are proving extremely good.  My original  panels were suppose to flash 3-4% on the + side.

A result of 20% above our existing panels was expected.  These panels are showing excellent low light gathering abilities along with a measured output about 21% above an equivalent 250 W panel (flashed to 262 W).  Because of a 1-3% burn in loss that normally occurs within the first week of operation, all solar panels should flash +3% above nameplate.  Some manufactures are ignoring this and charging a surcharge for + flash ratings.  Heliene did not partake in this questionable practice which I am very pleased that they didn't.  I was informed recently, that the glass used in these panels is stippled to improve the panel's efficiency.  Every little bit helps, even a small 1% improvement from stippled glass will give you more money in your pocket over the life time of the panels, which I hope to be well over 30 years.

Conclusion:

Based on our SolarEdge panel monitoring system, everything that Heliene states in their product description is 100% true.  They also use a Kynar (PVDF) backing material which is very similar to Tedlar which has become a standard in the industry.  Kynar is reported to being used in Germany for the past 25 years with excellent results.  I can not comment of the life of the panels and if and when I do, it will be too late for all of us anyway.  The panels do have an excellent backing material and long life should not be an issue.  The panels are also built for the Canadian snow load.  To date, there is only about a 3 Watt (1%) difference at peak output between all of the 5 panels.  With SolarEdge, it is best to review the output at the end of the day as some optimizers are slow to report their values.  At peak power, they were about 21% better than my existing panels which is excellent.  The day did yield our highest kw hrs but the sun or sky was NOT at it's clearest possible value as we did not peak as high as other days.

 I give them my 5 STAR Rating.

NOTE:  Being retired, because of the small income from the Solar Panels, we were able to re-start our support of a child in need from Nicaragua.  If you are better off, please also consider helping those in need though the Christian Children Fund of Canada.  For the small cost of your daily Tim's Coffee you can make a big difference in a family's life.

Do you want to have an extra $60,000 to $100,000 to spend over the next 20 years? At the end of your 20 year contract grid tie and Never pay for your electricity again.  It is the project that keeps giving and giving.  See my design post.

If you have been wondering whether or not to go solar, I strongly recommend that you give

 Steve a call at: 

Steve -519 962 9218

He will give you an honest analysis of your house to see if it is worthwhile to install a microfit solar panel system.  For what we earn, we will payoff our mortgage on our retirement house. We still have to pay utilities and taxes but we are way ahead of where we were and we are lowering the carbon dioxide levels as best as we can.  A basic system will produce about $5,000 per year with straight string inverters.  Stay away from that and go with optimizers.  With a few tweaks, you could produce $6-7000 per year.  I still don't trust microinverters to last much more than 12 years with a horrible replacement cost as they are under the panels. Read all of my posts, starting from the beginning to get a better understanding of solar.

We do not work for Flexible Solar serving Windsor and Southern Ontario.  I do however promote any honest person in their business where I have had the pleasure of working with them.  That is really hard to find in the solar business.  These guys use the best components for a long system life.  You can even ask them for a copy of my engineering specification that you can use to outline the work specification.  I am 100% sure that Mike Holmes would say that is the way to do things to protect yourself.  They also use the best guys out there to install your system.

NOTE:  We booked a holiday in Florida in March.  The microfit Solar Panel system's March's production covered the rental at the Resort plus $300 towards food and gas. You might say that the Sun gave us a holiday in the Sun.  We sure enjoyed ourselves.