Solar Nerd articles about: Panel Efficiency

If you’ve ever looked at the product sheet for a solar panel, you may have been confronted by tables of cryptic numbers and electrical terminology. Unless you’re an electrician or electrical engineer, you’ll probably find these a little bewildering. Fortunately, the average consumer can ignore most of them. Unless you’re an installer or hobbyist, many of the numbers are electrical specs that won’t matter to you. One exception, however, is power temperature coefficient.

When it comes to buying solar panels for your home, the first thing that manufacturers usually tout is the panel’s efficiency. Solar panel efficiency refers to the amount of sunlight hitting the panel that gets converted into electricity. The intensity of sunlight can be expressed in watts - the same unit used to measure electrical power. For example, if 1,000 watts of sunlight is shining on your solar panel and it generate 200 watts of electricity, the panel is 20% efficient.

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.

Solar homeowners always want to see their solar panels generating as much electricity as possible. But even if you live in one of the sunniest cities in the country, there will always be cloudy days. Or maybe you live in a place where the weather is more temperate, and you experience a mix of sun and cloud. If you want to go solar, you might wonder if certain solar panels perform better than others in cloudy conditions.

Is your house actually a space station? Is NASA your landlord? If so, then your home solar panels might be made by Boeing and deliver a sky-high 32% efficiency. It costs about $10,000 to send a pound of anything into orbit, and packing the maximum power onto a small satellite is critical, so it makes sense to use the absolute best available technology. By comparison, the solar panels I had installed on my house back in 2013 only manage about 16% efficiency - just half of what you’ll get from high-tech photovoltaic panels in space.

If you pay a solar contractor to install solar panels on your home, most of the nitty gritty technical terms are hidden away from you. They will give you an easy to understand proposal, and then one day you have shiny panels on your roof, generating electrons. It’s nice! But if you’re undertaking a DIY project, all the calculations are up to you. One concept that you may come across is the solar panel derate or derating factor.

Half-cut solar panels are one of the latest manufacturing innovations to improve solar panel efficiency. A half-cut solar panel is the same size as a standard panel, but the solar cells have been sawn in half then wired together in a way that allows the panel to be more efficient, especially in the shade. This doubles the number of cells and internal connections: a typical solar panel might have 60 cells, while a half-cut panel would have 120 cells.

Are you a meticulous number cruncher who breaks out the spreadsheet whenever you’re planning a big product purchase? I certainly am. The last time I bought a car, and made a spreadsheet with the specifications of all the car models I was considering. I rank-ordered them in each of the categories that were important to me, and made my decision based on which one performed the best. Figuring out which solar panel is best for you is a little like that, although with this article I hope to make is less complicated for you.

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.

If you own a home solar panel system, you might find that your system isn’t generating as much electricity as you think it should. Or perhaps you’ve got panel-level monitoring and can see that one or more panels are generating less power than the others. Before you call your installer for service, here are some reasons why your system might be having trouble. In this article: There are different reasons why your solar array will produce less energy than their theoretical maximum.