Solar pannels

[latravcha]

Originally Posted by Mako19

My senior project in college was to install and maintain a solar house. Beau Soleil was the name of the home, it was shipped to Washington D.C. to compete in the Dept Of Energy Solar Home contest. It is still intact and producing energy in Geraurd Park. It's ugly as hell but pretty cool concept.

What kind of questions do you have about solar panels?

Is it worth it?
What kind of maintenance can I expect?
How durable are they? Can they stand up hurricanes, hail, kids baseballs?
Does it have to be facing North south? What would happen if I faced it east west?

[Mako19]

Originally Posted by latravcha

Is it worth it?
What kind of maintenance can I expect?
How durable are they? Can they stand up hurricanes, hail, kids baseballs?
Does it have to be facing North south? What would happen if I faced it east west?

Is it worth it?: In my opinion not yet. Maybe with all of the tax rebates you can make your money back but I think we still have a decade or so to go in Solar Panel research and development.

Maintenance: Minimal. The panels are more efficient when clean so it is best to keep them clean and free of dust. I think most come with a 15 year warranty.

Hurricane: The ones that we bought were guaranteed to survive a hurricane with correct installation.

Hail, baseballs: We did break one panel while installing. They do shatter.

North, South: Best to face the panels in the direction that they will receive the most direct sunlight throughout the year. What direction depends on your exact location. I can't remember exactly which direction we faced them in Lafayette, but it definitely makes a difference. There is data that can be found on which direction is best for your location. IF they do face in wrong direction you simply would not have get maximum output from your system.

I believe the panels that we bought were $1k/panel. This was 5-6 years ago so I am sure they are much cheaper now. These were 200 watt panels. We had 36 of them and I think the most I ever saw us produce was 6.5k watts. That is instantaneous, to produce 6.5 k watt hours you would need to produce this much energy over an hour. a Kilo watt hour is how the electrical company charges you. This is on a perfectly clear day in the middle of the summer. The production drops substantially on a cloudy day.

Now for the poster who was talking about a 13.5k watt system that is very impressive. I would like to see his set up with all of those panels. The problem is you need a big enough roof, or an independent structure to support all of these panels. Also, I remember hearing that once you go into the green for the month with the electrical company, or produce more energy than you consume, they do not give you a 1:1 trade. They pay you a percentage of what they charge you for the same amount of energy. Check with your energy supplier to confirm or discount this.

This price does not include mounting (we used uni-strut), or inverters. The panels produce DC voltage so the inverters have to convert the energy to AC voltage before it can be applied to your electrical panel. Not sure about the price of the inverters but we had two on our system and split the panels up evenly to each one.

One thing you may be interested in is in the case of a power outage the inverters would shut down. You can not produce energy from your panel without power from the electrical company to run the inverters.

I still have some documents that show daily/weekly/monthly power production of our system if you are interested. Hope this helps.