So no surprise, I woke this morning to a little snow on top of a lot of frozen rain…
And it took a while, since it stayed cold all day, for the ice to let go of my solar panels. I went out a couple of times in the morning but finally cleared the panels on the ground mount and started to get some push into the batteries.
Then it was time to make bread. Since it was still cold inside the Lair, I took some good advice from commenters and warmed my mixing bowl with hot water.
Then I was able to proof the yeast…
…and go ahead and make my dough.
And the result was (a warm cabin and) a nice loaf of new bread, which I forgot to take a picture of.
I will prefix this by saying I know zero about solar power.
Now, having written the above…
I’ve been looking at adding solar to my workshop but, the idea of dealing with snow/ice has bothered me. One thing I’ve encountered is bidirectional solar panels being mounted vertically with zero angle. At the bottom of the panels were either mirrors or highly reflective metal to reflect light onto the panels. The advantage being that cleaning off the panels and the mirrors would be a lot easier than trying to clean the panels by climbing a ladder and risking a serious fall.
Yes, I know that you have regular panels. However, they could be mounted back to back so they would be bidirectional.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD1MT-ek05w
That’s a very interesting video. I never heard of “bi-facial” panels before but I have often thought that if I put a vertical panel or two on the north-facing side of my ground mount I would get a quicker boost in the morning. Especially in winter, when I could use that. Of course they’d be next to useless for most of the day so I never plan to really do that.
As to the vertical bi-facial panels in the video, the chart he keeps going back to seems to indicate the problem with that. I suppose the mirrors couldn’t hurt but I’m not seeing any huge improvement over a conventional ground mount. At least he’s not trying to sell tracking mounts – they went out of style for a *very* good and rather long set of reasons.