Latest articles by The Solar Nerd

For people living in cities, rooftop solar - literally putting solar panels on top of your house - is by far the most popular choice when going solar. For many people, it’s the only option, because city lots are often too small to consider anything else. But for people living on larger suburban lots or in the country, ground mounted solar can be an option and, in fact, is often the better way to go.

If you have Enphase microinverters, you will probably have a device called the Envoy. This is the device that reports your solar production data and makes it available to the website and smartphone app. Your Envoy is connected to the internet with a couple different possible methods. When it loses its connection for any reason, your solar production data in the app will be frozen at the last time that the Envoy was able to connect.

I live in Buffalo, New York. It snows a lot. Some years, it seems like winter lasts for nine months. And yet, I have a solar panel system that still provides some electricity in the dark winter months. There is definitely less production in the winter months. How much exactly? I’ll share some graphs from my system below. But first, here’s a table that shows my average total production in three different months over 5 years:

Most solar panels come with at least an 80% 25 year power warranty, meaning if they don’t have a failure before that, they’re guaranteed to still produce 80% of their original output after more than two decades. In addition, some panels come with a 25 year product warranty, meaning they’re warrantied against product defects for a very long time. When you have a photovoltaic system on your roof for that many years, it’s going to eventually experience severe weather.

Whether you’re a homeowner who is just learning about home solar panels, or a green energy enthusiast who is wondering how the electric grid can use solar energy when it’s dark, a question you might have is whether solar panels can store electricity for later use. As it turns out, solar panels by themselves can’t store electricity. Any energy that a solar panel generate exits the panel immediately. The panel itself has no capacity for holding electrons.

On a sunny day, the solar panels on the roof of your home might be generating thousands of watts of power. By itself, this isn’t a risk. After all, there’s already a fat cable that runs from a utility pole or underground conduit into your home that carries up to a couple hundred amps of electricity. Update: August 23, 2019 Walmart has put its lawsuit on “pause” while both companies work together on addressing the complaint.

There’s a lot of solar panel manufacturers in the marketplace. Chinese companies, spurred by the massive deployment of photovoltaics in China, occupy most of the top 10 spots for largest solar panel manufacturers in the world. The massive scale of the solar industry in China and Southeast Asia makes it hard for US-based companies to compete on price. Because of this, many American companies focus on the high end of the market by working to produce attractive and high efficiency cells.

When you’re trying to choose the right solar panel for your project, solar panel efficiency stands out as one of the key features. You might be familiar with polycrystalline and monocrystalline silicon, and know that mono solar cells have higher efficiency, generating more electricity from the same amount of sunlight compared to poly cells. But you generally pay more money for that higher performance. In the quest for ever-higher efficiency, manufacturers have developed bifacial solar cells.

One of the big reasons that people go solar is to reduce or get rid of their monthly electricity costs. If you use The Solar Nerd calculator, you can estimate how many solar panels you’ll need to generate 100% of your electricity needs. If your roof is large enough to fit all of those panels, you can reduce your annual electricity supply costs to zero. However, even if your solar panels supply 100% of your annual electricity needs, you will still receive a monthly bill from your electric company.

If you’ve read my article about how solar inverters work, you’ll know that one way to get the maximum output out of your solar panels in difficult shade conditions is to use microinverters. The company that is far and away the largest player in the microinverter industry is Enphase Energy. In business since 2006, the California-based Enphase has shipped over 20 million microinverters, so they have a lot of experience.