Articles tagged "panel efficiency"

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.

Solar panel manufacturers are always competing against each other to squeeze the most power out of the same size solar panels. If you installed solar panels on your home 10 years ago, you probably had panels with efficiency in the mid-to-high teens (by percentage of light converted to electricity). Today, you can commonly find solar panels that convert more than 20% of the incoming light into electricity, with the current best residential panels hitting nearly 23% efficiency.

Are you a meticulous number cruncher who breaks out the spreadsheet whenever you’re planning a big product purchase? If you are, you might conclude after running the numbers that the all-in cost of a system based on budget solar panels is better than one based on premium panels. After all, high-end solar panels can cost roughly 50% more than budget panels, and the increase in electricity generation you get from premium panels might never pay back that initial difference in price.

Solar panels don’t have any moving parts. They just quietly sit on your roof or in your backyard for a couple decades and generate electricity, day in and day out. How cool is that? A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows that new solar panels have a failure rate of only 5 in 10,000 per year. This means that every year, a solar panel has a 0.05% chance of failing, or a total 1.

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.

When you’re shopping for solar panels, one of the things that manufacturers usually tout is efficiency. A high efficiency panel turns more sunlight into electricity than a lower efficiency panel, which means a solar homeowner can get more out of their limited rooftop space. So if efficiency is a good thing, that must mean that you should shop for the highest efficiency panels you can get, right? No, not always. If you’re in a situation where it’s important to maximize your power generation - like if you have a small roof - then efficiency could be very important to you.

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:

Low light conditions are a normal situation that solar panels are well designed to handle. Whether it’s cloudy, rainy, or simply early in the morning or late in the afternoon, you should expect your solar panels to continue to generate power. The power output of your solar panels will drop, but with most panels the decrease is fairly linear. That is, if the sunlight drops by half, with most panels the output will also drop by half.

Solar panels work by collecting sunlight and magically turning it into electricity to power your home. So does that mean when the sun goes down your electricity turns off and you can’t watch Game of Thrones? Actually, no. Read more to learn about how electricity continues to work seemlessly in a solar home, even when it’s dark, cloudy, or your panels are covered in snow. First, an explanation. Sunlight is made up of elementary particles called photons.

Trying to find the best solar panels for your home can be an intimidating process. It’s not like buying a car, where you can go to the dealer and take a test drive, or taking a trip to the home center to peer inside refrigerators and pick out the one that fits best in your kitchen. One solar panel looks an awful lot like any other solar panel, and the manufacturers’ data sheets are long lists of acronyms and numbers.