SignatureSolarJames
Try Solar, the Grid will always take you back
OK, to get to the point here you will not get some “spread out of power production” by pointing your panels direct east and west. In summary the sum of the gains in the morning for the east panels plus the sum of the losses in the morning from the west panels equal the same production curve total. The same is true for the evening in this configuration. The only thing you affect is the overall output by around 14% for facing off-south with your arrays.
Anyways, I was getting all scientific about this 7 years ago, I split a 10kw array in the PV watts hourly model (available for free!) into 2x 5kw arrays, I plotted out the hourly graph of each 5kw array and thought I was on to something when each array skewed later or earlier in the day.
I then “Summed” the 2 tables into a combined impact table and plotted the graph. Lo and behold it was identical to the standard south facing hourly distribution bell curve
If you know your usage is leaning towards morning you can gain efficiency in direct use by pointing the panels more eastward, if you are heavy in the evening you can cock it west or SW.
Either way the “bell curve” of solar will not be flattened without a tracker chanding the direction in live time. If you overpanel then pointing east and west overall does not help. It may feel like you have “booster rockets” that time of day but franky the net result would be the same but less dramiiic if your “wrong facing” panels at the time were south faced as well.
Anyways, I was getting all scientific about this 7 years ago, I split a 10kw array in the PV watts hourly model (available for free!) into 2x 5kw arrays, I plotted out the hourly graph of each 5kw array and thought I was on to something when each array skewed later or earlier in the day.
I then “Summed” the 2 tables into a combined impact table and plotted the graph. Lo and behold it was identical to the standard south facing hourly distribution bell curve
If you know your usage is leaning towards morning you can gain efficiency in direct use by pointing the panels more eastward, if you are heavy in the evening you can cock it west or SW.
Either way the “bell curve” of solar will not be flattened without a tracker chanding the direction in live time. If you overpanel then pointing east and west overall does not help. It may feel like you have “booster rockets” that time of day but franky the net result would be the same but less dramiiic if your “wrong facing” panels at the time were south faced as well.