Latest articles by The Solar Nerd

According to Berkeley Lab, a large majority of homeowners are now choosing premium equipment for their home solar systems, including high efficiency solar panels and microinverters. When it comes to panels, one of the brands that’s producing some of the highest efficiency solar panels is REC Group. Founded in Norway in 1996, the company went through the kind of financial difficulties that many solar manufacturers have experienced, culuminating in their acquisition by the Chinese company BlueStar in 2014.

Solar panels don’t have any moving parts and they last a really long time - but they don’t last forever. There are a lot of reasons why solar panels go bad, from physical failures such as the layers in the panel separating to chemistry-related phenomenon such as potential-induced degradation. It may take decades for the drop is power to be significant, but over time all solar panels lose efficiency. (A solar panel’s 25 year power warranty reflects the manufacturer’s confidence in its long-term performance.

Tesla Energy, the division of Tesla responsible for solar and home battery products, makes the well-known Solar Roof that looks like sleek roofing tiles but generates clean electricity. But the Solar Roof is an expensive product that is best installed on a home that needs a new roof. If you have a newer roof that doesn’t need replacement, it typically doesn’t make financial sense to install a Solar Roof. In fact, Tesla recently dramatically raised the cost of the Solar Roof - double the price, according to some.

Petersen-Dean, a roofing and solar company founded in 1984 that operated in nine states, went bankrupt in 2020, leaving many of its customers in limbo. The company operated in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Nevada, Oklahoma and Texas. They started as a roofing company, then began offering solar installations, especially in California where solar installations are required on some new homes. While the COVID pandemic was perhaps the straw to break its back, the company was apparently in poor financial health for some time.

If you’ve ever seen a solar panel up close, you might have noticed thin little wires running across each cell. Those little wires do the important job of carrying electrons (electricity) generated by the solar cells into thicker main wires of the panel. You might know from high school science that thin wires have higher resistance, which means they lose more electricity as heat. In a solar panel, that means lower efficiency.

For most people, their home is their biggest financial asset. Drilling holes into it might seem like a bad idea, but that’s usually what’s needed to install solar panels on a roof. And yet, this does not need to be cause for concern: there are millions of homes with solar panels around the United States, and the majority of them are problem-free. Solar panels do not need to cause roof leaks: they can last problem-free for 25 years or more.

My solar-powered house is located in Buffalo, which is pretty famous for snow. The biggest one-day record for snow in Buffalo? 34 inches. Despite that reputation for the white fluffy stuff, we also get plenty of sunshine - even in the winter. In fact, clear and cold days in the winter can be great for solar production. Still, there are multiple weeks a year when my solar panels are underneath a blanket of snow.

The average size of a home solar installation in the United States is around 6 kilowatts, which is about 17 high efficiency premium solar panels, or more if you go with a cheaper panel. That many solar panels takes up a lot of space, and you would need a large available roof area to accommodate them. But sometimes, your roof might not be ideal for solar. It might be oriented east-west (which generates less power than a north-south orientation) or, more commonly, you might have shading from nearby trees or buildings.

Does your life involve taking lots of little electronic devices with you? Do you constantly worry about how much battery charge you have? Is the nearest outlet sometimes too far away? The solution that people typically reach for is an external battery. These are great and cheap, but suffer from a couple major flaws. First of all: you need to remember to keep them charged. If you have difficulty remembering to charge your phone, with an external battery now you have two things to keep track of.

For many homeowners, their house is their biggest investment, so anything that improves its value is a big win. Do you ever watch those home renovation shows on TV? If so, you know that the visual appeal of a house can have a big impact on its selling price. According a study by the universities of Alabama and Texas, homes with a high curb appeal sell for an average of 7% more than less attractive homes.