Our rooftop solar system has been operating for a full year now- time to look at the results. Other than snow covering panels, it’s been pretty maintenance free and generated many referrals for the installers from various people asking questions and wanting to learn more about it.
It is now late June, time to take a look at how our solar installation has been performing over the last six months. To recap, the system is a 5.2kW rooftop installation using 22 240W Sunpower ACPV panels with integrated microinverters (see detailed writeup at http://kuzyatech.com/going-solar). It was turned on in early December of 2013 and has been pumping energy since then. So what did we produce so far?
As I mentioned in the Going solar! post, my new solar electric system is using microinverters located on the back of each panel to optimize power production. All of them then connect in parallel on the AC side, running essentially independently. As an added benefit we get individual panel’s data. Let’s look into that in a bit more details.
Foot of snow on the panels
I’ve been a big fan of solar energy for years, reading every issue of Home Power magazine, and every other thing I could find. But it always seemed way out of reach for various reasons, until this year that is. Continue reading