Best month of the year for solar harvesting near Windsor Ontario

Hi, again.  In my original post back in 2013 I mentioned that May would be the best harvesting time of the year, or least that was what I was told.

On paper, the best month should be when the days are the longest and when the sun is over head perpendicular to your panels.  That said, the weather, or rather, the cloud cover will determine your best month of the year.  I also notice that in June the Sun sets and rises north of west and north of east.  We have some trees in our front yard that I never thought would bother us but they do in June.  West facing panels are not the demons that they were presented out to be.  A balanced system with south, east and west facing panels is the best.  It is important to have some west facing panels to help out the grid in the evening.

High temperature has about a -5% effect on your panels in the summer.  In the winter even with the extremely poor roof angle, a really cold day with a nice wind can make the panels produce maximum output for a little while.  The days are too short to produce a lot of power in the winter and the snow has to be cleared off of the panels.  You can harvest 250% more in summer than in the winter months.

For the past  two years JULY has been our best month.  This year will be a new record for us of around 2.455 MW hours.  Last year was 2.127 MW hours.  The last two weeks of sun really helped 2015.  Like wise the record rain in June reduce our output by about 300 kW hours.  Our peak day record was 103.8 kW hours this year.  This is a non-tracking fixed roof mounted system.  Only a SolarEdge system will work like this as the output of one panel does not effect the output of the string.  Micro inverters also will not work well in our system.  We simply have two 5000 W inverters giving us our 10 kW microfit system.


We are doing our share to help reduce the global CO2 levels and even drive a hybrid Ford C-Max to boot.  We thank the Good Lord for shining on our roof this year.

I did notice that on some really hot  days that the wind was under 3 mph.  That meant that solar panels were the only ones helping the grid that day and Not the wind turbines.  Our line  voltages were also lower showing the lack of wind generation.