Our solar panels were installed and became operational (not the same thing; see solar saga story) on October 30, 2010. We had just missed a most beautiful, sunny October, weather that did not require heat or air conditioning and therefore was potentially a month in which we could have been a net energy producer.
But we missed that month, and our solar panels hummed (not literally – they are noiseless) for exactly 2 weeks. Then we got a major snowstorm on November 13th (I don’t have to keep a log of the weather or go back and look it up – you can tell from the solar panel graphs exactly when it happened). That snow was wet and sticky, and Minneapolis continued to get pummeled with snow for the re
st of the winter.
What’s cool about the Enlighten Enphase mirco-inverters, besides making the entire array more efficient, is that I can monitor the solar production at anytime from a computer with an internet connection. The hard part is getting the snow off the panels, which are angled at only 15 degrees – not quite steep enough for the snow to just slide off.
So, as shown in the graph in the upper right hand corner, we had no electricity production from mid-November until January 31st, when some of the snow must have melted or slid off. We were averaging about 3 to 4 killowatt hours per day. That is paltry compared to what it should be – on May 16th, for example, the system peaked at 23.1 kilowatt hours.
Then, in one of many May storms, we got some hail the size of golf balls. It shattered one solar panel (the top right one), so our system is again not performing as well as it could be. But it is summer, and the days are longer, and I cannot complain, because we have already produced almost one and a half megawatt hours of electricity right here on our roof. Happy summer!