Solar Nerd articles about: Panel Technology

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). However, grid electricity is alternating current (AC), so the power from solar panels must be converted from DC to AC before it can be useful to your home. That’s the job of an inverter, which you can read about in detail in our guide to solar inverters.

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.

Normal solar panels generate electricity from sunlight that hits the front of the panel, but bifacial panels can use light that hits the back of the panel too. Bifacial panels do this by having a transparent layer at the back of the panel, where a standard panel would have an opaque backsheet. At the top of this article, you can see bifacial solar panels that are mounted on a carport. These panels are made by Lumos, a solar manufacturer based in Colorado, and are “glass-on-glass” panels that are constructed from two glass layers: one each at the front and back.

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 about half.

Are you interested in home solar panels but think they’re ugly? Some people think that solar panels can look pretty cool, but there’s no doubt that conventional solar panels draw attention to themselves, which may not be something you want for your home. While you can take steps to improve the curb appeal of solar panels, some homeowners simply don’t like their look no matter how sleek and professional a job the installer does.