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.