Setting up your solar system is not as easy as putting your solar panels in the sun and plugging them in. Too bad as many more people would want to do it then. You have to study your house and property to see where exactly you need to put the panels. When we first moved here we only had one panel. So we could go outside and move it around to follow the sun. That’s okay when you are starting out. Not if you have more than one or two though. It can get tiring after doing it every day in all kinds of weather. You wouldn’t want the panels to get blown over due to the wind or a storm. We were lucky when we got hit by an in line tornado in 2000. We had about six trees down on our house, but no damage. Most important was that there was no damage to our lone solar panel which was on the side of the house the trees hit. Didn’ get touched though.
A tool that can help you decide where your panels should go is called the Solar Pathfinder
It will give you the sun potential for the whole year! Good to use for setting up a garden as well. It also has software that you can purchase to help you in accessing your solar energy needs called the Solar Pathfinder Assistant Software
You really need the sun as much as you can get it. Our sun here in upstate New York is not as dependable as other places in the country. We are hardly getting any right now (December). We plan on putting our solar panels on top of our barn roof hopefully next year. If we were just setting this up though and had this handy tool, we would have just seen from the start that the place to put them was up there. My husband has observed every hour, every day, every month, every year that the place to put them would be the barn roof. It gets sun consistently.
Here’s the information you need to check it out. It is essential to use the if you are building a new home and plan to set up a complete alternative energy system. Tell me what you think about it.
Copyright © 2008 Kathleen G. Lupole
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Tags: Pathfinder | solar | Solar Pathfinder | solar system
June 16th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
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