Solar Nerd articles about: Specifications

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.

If you’re a more detail-oriented (or perhaps nerdy) person, you might spend a lot of time studying the technical specifications of your home solar system. Maybe you want to better understand a system you already own, or you’re comparing quotes from installers and trying to make the best choice. Once you get beyond the basics like the system output and inverter type, one of the concepts you might encounter is called inverter clipping, which is closely related to the DC/AC ratio of the system.

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.

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.

Did you know that the record for a hailstone in the United States is 8 inches? According to CNN, a giant hailstone discovered in South Dakota was the size of a volleyball and weighed almost two pounds. Yikes! If an 8 inch hailstone hit your solar array, there definitely would be damage. Luckily, hail like this is extremely rare. But what about more ordinary hail? Solar panels are designed and tested to withstand hail that is rated up to “severe” by the US National Weather Service, which is hail up to one inch in size or with wind gusts up to 58 mph.

Solar panels come in all kinds of different sizes, from foldable panels you can take camping to large panels that are deployed in megawatt-sized solar farms. There are even little ones that you can fit in a backpack to keep your phone or laptop charged. This article will focus on solar panels for homes, because a homeowner will often want to know how many solar panels will fit on their roof or in their backyard.