Expert Solar Panel Installers in Lake Country, BC

If there is sunlight outside, your solar panels will produce power. Solar panels work best with direct sunlight on them, so any clouds, rain, snow, smoke, smog or dust will have a negative effect on their production. Solar simulation software will account for your local area's year round weather conditions, so the models that are presented to you will take all of these factors into account to produce the simulated energy yields. To see an example of the effect, have a look below at the same site showing a perfect summer day vs a perfect winter day vs a rainy/cloudy winter dayA Perfect Summer Day vs a perfect Winter Day vs a Cloudy and Rainy Winter Day

We definitely don't recommend cleaning your solar panels if it is dangerous to do so. Solar panels do produce the most energy when receiving the purest and most direct sunlight, so cleaning your panels will surely give you better energy yields. HOWEVER, the effort of cleaning panels are significant, the gains are not stellar and the time it takes for them to accumulate the same amount of dust are usually fairly short, so in most cases we don't clean solar panels and let God take care of cleaning them with rain, wind and snow. Solar panels get very hot during sunlight hours, so if you clean them with water, make sure it's in the early morning or evening to avoid cold water on hot surfaces that might crack them as a result.

For commercial installations we would almost always do a structural review to ensure your roof structure can handle the added weight of a solar array. Solar panels weigh very little compared to the amount of surface area they take up, so the weight is distributed across a very large area. In my 12+ years doing solar I have only once come across a roof that was not able to bear the weight of solar, so the chances are very likely that your roof will be fine to carry solar.

Both have pro's and con's so if possible in an ideal world it's best to do both AC and DC coupling for off-grid. AC coupling produces power directly to the loads, meaning there is only 1 conversion from solar to AC. The downside is that your backup inverter needs to charge the batteries and in most cases they will have a lesser capacity than the inverters are supplying, so if you are not consuming all your power, your grid-tied inverters will have to throttle back resulting in lost solar production. DC coupling directly charges the batteries, so using DC chargers allows for full usage of your solar power until the batteries are full. To get usable AC power there are 2 conversions, 1 from solar to 48V and again by the backup inverter to 240V resulting is slightly less efficiency. AC coupling will result in a higher usable peak power because your grid tie-inverter produces power for the load and your backup inverter can too. For example, 10kW of Grid-tie with 10kW of Backup means you can run a 20kW load in peak solar conditions. For the same system DC coupled, your 10kW backup inverter is your only source of AC power, so that is the maximum load you can run before getting to the overload threshold.