Solar Update

 The shorter days are starting to show up on our daily Kilowatt collecting. In June we were getting 105 to 116 Kilowatts per sunny day. Now in November, shorter days but the nice blue sunny sky we have had these last few days, has moved the Kilowatts to 60 - 65 KW per day. Which is still very good. That is twice what a normal house in the upper Midwest would use (30 kw per day).

 November and December are usually the cloudiest months of the year. So we are happy to be experiencing the sunshine. You can see in the pics here how the snow affected my garage and solar ground mount.

 

We had a 7 inch snowfall. Solar panels don't work when they are snow covered. You can see my solar panels on the roof of my garage. I did brush them off with a ladder and a long brush meant for solar panels. Then it took another four days for the snow to totally melt off the panels.

This is my ground mount solar array. I can change the tilt angle of the solar panels from season to season. When the snow storm hit, the panels were in their fall/spring angle of about 37 degrees. This pic was taken right after the snow storm. Most of the snow didn't even stick to the panels. If a person had a fixed, non adjustable solar panel array, this would be the desired angle to have year round.

Here I have the solar panels at the winter angle of about 61 degrees for our Latitude. At this steep angle, unless it is a very sticky snowfall, I do not think the snow can stick to the panels at all.

Here are our solar numbers for October. 1.41 MegaWatts or 1410 Kilowatts.