Solar with Snow

The past few days we have met our first signs of Canadian winter. Although winter has not officially arrived, we have received at least a couple of snow dustings that resulted in enough accumulation on the roof to cover the solar panels.

I wanted to record our observation with this “new” experience in terms of the impact to power generation. Below is a chart on solar power generation in the past few days with different weather conditions during the shorter days of our Canadian autumn.

Solar power generation from Nov. 07 to 18 with different weather

Our highest recorded power per day is around ~110 kWh during a nice sunny, long, summer day in June. We are now facing shorter days with the panels active from around 8am to a little after 3pm, as the chart below shows.

Solar generation through out the day during Nov. 17 (partially cloudy)

Below you will see what my roof looks like today on November the 18th. Click the video below to see the entire roof.

Partially covered roof on a cloudy November 18th (click to play)

You can see that we have some panels that are fully exposed, and some that are partially covered. The solar optimizers are optimizing away during these times, and when the sun comes out, we can still sometimes generate above 3500W of instantaneous solar power.

During these dark and short days, we are now definitely eating into our stored electrical credits from Alectra Utilities.

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