The light beige part is flat, the darker pitched bit above that is the older part of the house. Currently I'm planning to put the panels to the left of the skylight facing due South. There's no shading there, but still I'm planning to get a Solmetric SunEye from the PG&E PEC tools lending library at the end of the week (free!) to do a proper shading analysis of the site.
I've gotten reasonably handy with Google Sketchup, so I've created a no-frills model of my house in 3d to get a better idea of how to lay out this system:
Yeah, I know there's a door to nowhere =) It leads out onto a deck that I might eventually include in this model. I had hoped to simulate shading in this model, but it looks like I'd need to get the Pro version of SketchUp and that's not in my budget. So, next steps are:
1. Solar site survey.
2. Settle on a Bill of Materials for this project.
3. Submit system plans to the city.
I'm getting sage advice and help from an engineer friend of mine who suggested the city might have concerns about wind loading on the panels given the pitch that I want (~50 degrees), so #3 needs to be done soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment