Latest articles by The Solar Nerd

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.

I personally like the look of solar panels on my house. I think they’re interesting to look at, and they’re often a conversation starter. But my solar panels face the backyard away from the street, so even if I didn’t like how they look, people casually passing by don’t see them. Not everyone has that choice: typically, you want your solar panels pointed south to capture as much sunlight as possible, but doing that might mean facing the panels toward the curb.

With the exploding popularity of rooftop solar, competition among solar installers to capture as much of that market is intense. If you live in one of the hot markets for rooftop solar such as California, Hawaii, the southwest, and some northeast states, there’s a good chance you’ve heard your doorbell ring and found a solar salesperson at your door, ready to pitch you on the benefits of rooftop solar. It’s one thing to buy Girl Scout cookies (Thin Mints!

If you have a very large house, you probably have high electricity usage too, possibly making your home a good candidate for solar. If you’re curious about solar and want to find out how many solar panels you’d need for your home that is 4,000 square feet or larger, the most accurate way to find that out is to get a professional solar installer to perform an analysis. 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.

Most people know that if you want to cook some, say, chicken wings, it’s a lot cheaper to go to a big-box store and buy a 50 lb frozen box of wings than a small pack from your grocery store. And yet, many people will choose to pay a higher per-wing price and go with the smaller package, because often that’s what makes the most sense. In this one respect, solar panels are a little like chicken wings.

Whether you’re a camper, boater, someone who wants backup power for occasional blackouts or an uninterruptible power supply for important equipment such as a home server or computer, a solar generator can be a great option that also happens to be more environmentally friendly. A solar generator isn’t a generator in the same way that a traditional gasoline generator is. There’s no engine inside: instead, a solar generator consists of a large lithium-ion battery and one or more solar panels to recharge it.

One of the reasons that many homeowners add solar panels to their roof is to help contribute to a better environment. When it comes to climate change, solar panels absolutely are net positive. In 3 or 4 years they “pay back” the energy that was used to manufacture them, after which they generate clean electricity for another couple decades. Coal and gas-fired power plants, in contrast, are never clean sources of energy.