Talking About My Off Grid Tiny Home Solar Panels N19

After connecting a single solar panel to my tiny house on wheels and getting some power inside I go out and discuss the solar power situation here in my location.

When you buy solar panels they tell you a whole bunch of nice, large numbers. How many watts a solar panel will produce. But what they do not tell you so clearly is that these solar panels are tested in a lab under perfect conditions. These conditions are rarely ever met in a real world situation.

Out here in the woods and off the grid in a Northern climate those conditions are very rare. The trees block a lot of the sunlight at any given time of the day. The sun is lower in the sky in winter and hardly clears the trees anyway.

I get about three hours of full sunlight on my solar panels in the winter. There is some indirect sunlight filtered through the trees but this is not optimal and not enough to power my tiny home.

My needs are small but so is the power being produced by my solar panels. I am only running a laptop, internet and some LED lights for the most part. But even this little bit of power is hard to get on cold dark winter days.

Cloudy and rainy days reduce the power produced tremendously. My 200 watt solar panel often only produces a few watts on a rainy day.

Amorphous panels produce more power per watt on cloudy days than poly or mono crystalline solar panels. I will be getting more amorphous solar panels throughout the winter.

I had to move my solar panel wires in order to reach the tiny home. This puts my solar panels in the shade most of the day. I am getting some mid afternoon sun but it is not enough. I will have to get more wire on payday at the end of the month and extend my wires some more.

I also plan to put up more solar panels. I want to have panels pointed at various points in the sky to catch the sun at all hours of the day. This will increase my overall solar power production.

Next year I want to build a solar tracking system to make my solar panels follow the sun as it moves across the sky.

Follow my daily progress on the path to self sufficiency on my off grid solar homestead.
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