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How Much Solar Power can my Home Generate!
The size of your solar installation is usually limited by the size of your home’s roof unless you decide to find another place to put your solar panels. (Some homeowners have used out buildings for Solar Installations and some have enough property to put a Ground Mounted Solar Installation on their properties.)
We generally recommend that a home owner try to place enough Solar Panels in their installations to replace at least 50% of their energy needs from Solar. Even with a Solar Installation most homeowners will need to use the utility companies for additional power. The utility companies generally act as a big battery for Solar homes. When your home is generating more power than currently needed, you send the extra energy back through the Grid to the electric company.
When it is dark or rainy or otherwise not sunny, the electric company sends you energy.
Shade, roof orientation, roof incline, and your latitude all effect how much Solar Power you can generate at your home. Luckily North Carolina has great access to the sun and are only a few percentage points behind Florida for having great and continuous sunlight. South facing roofs with inclines of 25-35%, that are rectangular with sufficient space for the size system you want, are the best locations for Solar Installations. Most residential locations have some issues with Shade. That is why Academy Solar uses microinverters in your Solar Installation. Solar Panels produce DC current which does not travel as well as AC current. Also in older style Solar Installations, one main, large, noisy, with moving parts, single inverter was used in the systems rather than microinverters. Those system inverters had to be matched to the size of the system. And if one panel was not producing, it brought down the electrical production of the entire Solar Installation!
Microinverters solve all these problems and that is why Academy Solar only installs residential systems using microinverters! Microinverters put the energy conversion right at your Solar Panels and convert at the panel the DC electrical power produced by your panel directly to AC at the panel. The improvement in electric transmission can increase the efficiency of your system from 5-10% better than the old style systems.
Additionally, microinverters make the Solar Panels work in Parallel rather than Series with older systems. This means that each panel produces the maximum amount of power it can given the sun available. With older systems, shade on one panel reduced the power of the entire system. Now with microinverters, each panel produces the most energy it can and no one panel can bring down the system.
Additionally, microinverters allow our customers to see the energy production on each of their panels. You can immediately tell if any panel is not producing and we at Academy Solar will come out and replace any panel having problems using our Solar guarantees!
