Advice Needed - Panel Layout

Man, I feel your pain. Maybe this will help for some background. You got good advice here already. It’s a long read but will help in covering the basics.
New Solar planning and design guidelines

Groetnis

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Aaaa yes i am actually in the proses of reading. Still open on one of my windows.

Thank you I will try and finish it. Not to fond of reading more a picture kind of guy. He he he. Seems like I will need to change.

You don’t have to understand it to much. It comes down to this, and I will make it simple and not involve any radians even though I feel dirty doing trig with degrees.

The cosine of 10 degrees is 0.984. That means if you are 10 degrees off, you’re only losing 1.6% of the power.

The cosine of 20 degrees is 0.94, so now you lost a whole 6% of the power!

The cosine of 30 degrees is 0.86. 14% of the power is gone now!

If you borrow your kid’s scientific calculator, you can play around with it a bit.

The point is that up to 10 degrees off makes very little difference. And to give you a formula for estimating the effect of the panel angle. Should you want to :slight_smile:

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Another rule of thumb, Panel angle = latitude. For my system I added to my latitude of 25 deg and used 33 deg for panel angle. I biased my system to compensate for shorter days in Winter by setting them up to give me more energy in Winter than Summer. I also added extra panels so I get a bit more energy in the mornings and evenings while it is maxed out during midday for a longer period. That discards some potential energy, but on balance it works out better for me.

Groetnis

That was actually my question right at the beginning. I wanted to confirm that I should add a panel to take it to a better state or pwer supply. In a previous comment a calculated that it would be right on the edge of the weet spot of the mppt on the inverter for the volts and just about 12,5% over spec on the watts

A few more things on that then. Be careful with adding panels. The current from the panels can be limited by the Inverter or MPPT if external, but more than the max voltage will fry em. Stay a few % points away from there. Cold weather and bright sunshine will produce the max voltages, so account for that. You can search, there are calculators for that.

Also make sure of the specification for max panel voltage at whatever device you connect them to, it gets fried easily…

MaxvoltGroetnis