When solar panels hibernate

As an “early adopter”, I still don't have solar panels on or around my house. There are several reasons for it. First, we don't use that much electricity.

Our new house has LED lights and efficient appliances so it's not really worth the savings – sounds like a poor excuse - its eaves are oriented the wrong way and then, there's the winter snow on the roof as ground solar panel installation would be both inefficient and tricky if it where in our small yard.

So far, our snow season has been a good and plentiful one and it has given me plenty of opportunities to see how long snow sticks on my neighbors' roof-mounted photo-voltaic panels.

The result is that, pretty much from November until now, snow has covered them, so a good four months.

While solar panel actually work better in cold weather and when there's snow around them, they stop working when there's snow covering them. In my case they would be totally inaccessible even if I wanted to clean off the snow with a long-armed broom or special shovel.

The good news is that we don't always have winter like the one we lived through this season and that we ought to think about the eight remaining months of the year.

I guess, we'll need to revisit this issue!