The most common understanding of which way panels should face is North.. and this is true to a certain extent. It also matters what available roof space you have, whether it be North, South East or West.
West & East facing panels do produce about 10-15% less then north facing and south facing panels produce about 40% less then north facing. The steeper the south facing panels are as well, the less they will produce.
If you had ample roof space, then your lifestyle plays a big factor on your design because essentially, you need to design your system around when you are going to use the most power.
If you are a family who wake up and are out of the house early on, kids are off to school and the husband/wife are off to work... then west facing panels would be ideal because you would tend to use more power when everyone's at home of an afternoon. If you work afternoon/night shift where most of you power would be consumed in the morning then east would work better.
- Higher energy usage in the morning - east facing panels
- Higher energy in the afternoon - west facing panels
Solar panel efficiency refers to the ability of a solar photovoltaic (PV) panel to convert sunlight into electricity effectively. It's a crucial factor in determining how much electricity a solar panel can generate from a given amount of sunlight. Efficiency is typically expressed as a percentage and represents the ratio of usable electricity output to the total amount of sunlight the panel receives.
Here's a breakdown of how solar panel efficiency works:
- Sunlight Absorption: When sunlight hits a solar panel, it contains energy in the form of photons. The efficiency of a solar panel is directly related to its ability to absorb these photons.
- Photon-to-Electron Conversion: Solar panels are made up of semiconductor materials (usually silicon) that contain many tiny cells. When photons from the sunlight strike these cells, they can dislodge electrons from their atoms, creating an electric current.
- Losses: Not all the energy from the absorbed photons gets converted into electricity. Some energy is lost due to various factors, including:
- Reflection: Some photons bounce off the panel's surface and are not absorbed.
- Thermal Losses: Solar panels can heat up in sunlight, and this heat energy is typically lost.
- Resistance: Electrical resistance within the panel's materials can cause some energy loss.
- Electrical Output: The electricity generated by the solar panel is collected and sent to an inverter, which converts it from direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC) for use in your home or to feed into the grid.
If you have a property that has potential shading issues such as trees, etc, an optimised system may be more beneficial to you. An optimised system also offers exceptional consumption monitoring down to the panel level to the point where if there is an issue with a panel, it alerts the installer.
A standard string system reduces its output if a panel is shaded and has no output if there is a fault in the circuit. The reason for this is that string system panels are wired in a series while in an optimised system, the DC optimisers are wired in a series and the panels are wired in parallel to them. This allows the circuit to bypass a faulty panel because there is another path.
FIT stands for Feed In Tariff. Feed In Tariffs are what your energy provider pays you for the generated power that you feed back to the grid. FITs are great now but they won’t be available forever. I see a lot of people using FITs as a big consideration when choosing a system size. Don’t base your system on it – think of it as a nice, handy little benefit. The reason it won’t be around forever is the more that solar becomes prevalent in communities, the less likely energy providers are going to allow exporting to the grid. Once they start denying exporting, this essentially means whatever you produce will either supply your house or be wasted.
The Sun’s energy hits the panels.
The Solar Panels convert the sun’s energy into DC power. This DC power travels to the inverter via the installed DC cable.
The Inverter converts the DC power to usable AC power and distributes it to either the house or back to the grid.
Your household appliances utilise the AC power from your solar and would only draw power from the grid if your usage surpassed what your solar was producing.
Your Meter reads the excess solar production being fed back to the grid so you can earn money from it. It also reads what you are drawing from the grid.
During periods of low sunlight where your system isn't producing power, the grid supplies your household with electricity generated from power stations.We are always updating our products to give our future clients the best possible product with respect to pricing and performance at the current time of the market. This is always changing with the engineering advances of many solar panel and solar inverter manufacturers so please ask us about the latest and greatest.
It's a good idea to clarify if the quoted price is locked in. On the odd occasion, if an installer hasn't visited your property, they may have missed several items that will end up costing you more.
With Zeneco, our prices are fixed as we will ensure someone is sent out to conduct a site assessment - if there is any additional costs incurred because we have missed something during this, it's on us - not you.
Knowledge of maintenance is essential as for most inverter and solar panel manufacturers, maintenance is built into their warranty information and must be adhered to in order not to void your warranty.
Many companies do use subcontractors for their jobs, which essentially means that you are rolling the dice. You may get a good installer or you may get a bad installer. Regardless, you are not going to get someone that is fully invested in your install.
Typically, we can complete most installations in a day but it is best to clarify with us how long the installation will take as there are many factors that can affect the length of install.
There are 3 warranty periods to closely identify: Workmanship, Inverter and Panel warranties.
Our workmanship warranty is 10 years which is an industry standard. We do however offer an industry leading 15 year product warranty if you complete 5 consecutive years of our maintenance plan.
Our inverter warranties are generally minimum 10 years and most of our panels are 25 year product/25 year performance warranties.