Latest articles by The Solar Nerd

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.

There’s a lot of myths when it comes to lightning, such as lightning never striking the same place twice, or that using an umbrella in a storm puts you at greater risk of being hit by lightning. It’s understandable: lightning is a mysterious force of nature to many, and it’s also destructive, causing over $1 billion in property damage in the United States every year. When it comes to solar panels, there’s one persistent myth, which is that putting solar panels on your home can actually attract lightning to your home.

If you’re a homeowner who is comparing solar panels, there are really only a few features that obviously differentiate one panel from another, and efficiency tends to be one that manufacturers place front and center. Solar panel efficiency refers to how much light a solar panel converts into electricity. The higher the efficiency, the more electricity you’ll get from the panel for the same amount of light. For a rooftop deployment with limited space, this can be a very important feature.

Net metering is an important policy that gives solar homeowners full credit for any solar electricity they send into the grid. But many utilities want to end the policy, claiming that it’s an unfair subsidy that raises the cost of electricity for non-solar homes. More than that, electric utilities claim that solar net metering is a subsidy for relatively rich homeowners who can afford to go solar at the expense of lower income people who can’t afford to put solar panels on their house, or don’t have that option because they’re renters.