Our Solar Exposure

Please pardon the interruption of our regularly scheduled program of the Health Petal to bring some information that we just learned.  Our site has awesome solar access.  Ryan and I took the Pathfinder tool to the property site yesterday and conducted a Solar Survey.

In a nutshell, this device has a compass and some special paper. Stand at the place where you think you want to put your solar panels. Ideally, get up on something high so that you can duplicate the height of the panels. We did ours on the ground. Doing this skews the results to the conservative side.

Point the tool to TRUE SOUTH. In our area that means 165 degrees. Place the dome over the paper and reflected on the dome are all of the possible sources of shadow or sun blockage. On the paper is the path of the sun at the various times of the year. Trace the shadows on the dome to the paper.  Add up all of the values, factor in the angle of the panels (you can use 100% value if your panels are mounted at the optimum 33-37.8 degrees of tilt, which ours will be). The result is the percentage sun exposure of your site. You will be able to see on the paper, where the sun will be every month of the year approximately. It's pretty cool.

According to our survey, we have 83.1% solar exposure!!! 

This is a conservative value as we were at ground level, used only the full values on the paper and the fact that we may be cutting down one or more of the trees that you can see on the bottom right of the paper (one is dead).

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