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.