Latest articles by The Solar Nerd

To generate the maximum electricity from your solar panels, you want them pointed south (if you live in Northern Hemisphere). But what if you only have a roof pointed east that gets good sunlight? Can solar still work at your house? The answer is yes, with caveats. If your panels are pointed directly east, they will generate about 80% as much power as they would if they were pointed directly south.

Let’s just cut to the chase: for most homeowners, a solar lease or power purchase agreement (PPA) will be somewhere between average and terrible for the homeowner. Here’s the bullet points on why: Solar leases and PPAs usually have an escalator clause that raises the cost of your electricity by a fixed amount every year. You could end up paying more for electricity than if you didn’t go solar at all.

Solar panels keep getting cheaper, but price isn’t the only consideration when it comes to buying solar panels for your home. As a modern technology, the rapid evolution of solar is more similar to your smartphone than to mature energy technologies that solar competes with, such as gas turbines or coal powered steam plants. If you’re a homeowner who is contemplating putting solar panels on your roof or backyard, you might be a little overwhelmed with the technical terminology and all of the choices available.

If you’re one of those people who never pays attention to their utility bill, you might assume that there’s just one price you pay for electricity. Electricity is priced by the kilowatt-hour (kWh), and if you didn’t know, one kWh is equal to using 1,000 watts (a kilowatt) of electricity for one hour. If you left your hair dryer running on high for 32 minutes, you’d use about one kWh.

97% of scientists believe that the Earth’s climate is changing and that humans are the reason. This isn’t new. The fact that carbon dioxide traps heat isn’t in scientific dispute, and the idea that humans burning massive amounts of fossil fuels could affect the climate has been around since at least 1912: Climate change story in a New Zealand newspaper. August 14, 1912. More recently, scientists looked back at climate models from the 1970s and found that they were remarkably accurate.

In a home solar installation, the inverter plays the critical role of turning the direct current from the solar panels into alternating current that the house can use. Broadly speaking, there are three types of inverter systems: microinverters, string inverters, and power optimizers. There are pros and cons to each of these, and situations where one type is more appropriate than another. While a quality solar installer will answer all of your questions about why they recommend a particular inverter, it’s always a good idea to have as much knowledge as possible so that you can ask intelligent questions.

Homeowners who are interested in going solar often want to know how many solar panels it will take to power their house. The most accurate way to find that out is to get a professional solar installer to perform an analysis on your home. A quick but somewhat less accurate way is to read your monthly electric bill and use our solar calculator to determine what your power generation and estimated system price would be.

As a consumer searching for the best solar panels to put on your home, there really isn’t a lot that distinguishes one solar panel from another. If you’re shopping for a car, there’s probably a hundred features, big and small, that make one vehicle different from another. But when it comes to solar panels, it really comes down to a few things: price, warranty, high temperature performance and - probably most notably - efficiency.

When it comes to buying solar panels for your home, there isn’t a lot that obviously differentiates one solar panel from other. If you buy a car, there’s dozens, if not hundreds of different features, styles, and add-on options that you can take into account. But with a solar panel, there’s really only a handful of characteristics that make one product different from another. One of these is the type of material the individual solar cells are made of.

Solar panels are magical things that turn sunlight into electricity. The electrons that flow out of a solar panel move in a steady stream, known as direct current (DC). But because Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse triumphed over Thomas Edison in what is now called The War of the Currents (they even made a movie out of it!) we use alternating current (AC) in our homes instead of DC. This means that the DC electricity generated by solar panels needs to be converted into AC before your home can make use of it.