Overcast

[watervole]

I'd describe the sky right now as overcast.  The sky is pretty much covered, but it isn't rain clouds.

Generation at 520W at 12:30  (of which I'm using 200W)

As I get a feel for maximum generation at different times of day and what fraction cloud cover knocks off, I'll probably be able to predict what to expect.  For a very rough figure, I'd say that 'overcast' reduces power generation to around a quarter of 'full sun'.  But at this time of day, a quarter is still enough to cover my consumption.

Comments

[cdybedahl]

How sturdy are the panels? I can't help thinking about how it'd work up here, and at the moment we've had constant snow cover since late November. So if the panels aren't sturdy enough to clear snow off them, they'd have been utterly useless for the past four months.

Mind you, I'm not sure how much use they'd have been anyway, with the sun being up for less than six hours a day in December. And cloudy. I don't think we had a single hour of sunlight in December this winter.

[watervole]

I've no idea. They expect them to last 25 years on my roof, and we'll get some snow in that time, but I've no idea how they'd deal with someone scraping them (or standing on them for that matter).

Do you have companies in Sweden who can answer those kinds of questions? The market will be very different for you.

You'd probably cover a lot of your power requirements in summer, but get next to nothing in winter.

At high latitudes, you may waste less solar power as some may be useful in heating.

[cdybedahl]

What information I can find seems to indicate it's very marginally useful here. OTOH, geothermal heating seems to be a lot more common here than in UK.

And it's irrelevant for us personally at the moment, since we don't have a house. I'm just being curious.