Gloomy and cloudy day. Panels still making great power!

[Crowz]

Ive finally got to where I make 3kw or more of power with it completely clouded over. Loving it !

Used to be I wouldn't even look at the power readings for my setup if it was cloudy. Why bother since it would just be depressing.

Not anymore though. I have no clue why it works so well since Ive had about the same amount of panels at my other house before this and it didn't make squat on cloudy days. Now it provides all of the power my house needs to run my house even cloudy.

Rain is another story. If its raining it doesn't do much. When the rain stops and the clouds are still there it goes to making power. Weird.

 

[Aridom82]

Ive finally got to where I make 3kw or more of power with it completely clouded over. Loving it !

Used to be I wouldn't even look at the power readings for my setup if it was cloudy. Why bother since it would just be depressing.

Not anymore though. I have no clue why it works so well since Ive had about the same amount of panels at my other house before this and it didn't make squat on cloudy days. Now it provides all of the power my house needs to run my house even cloudy.

Rain is another story. If its raining it doesn't do much. When the rain stops and the clouds are still there it goes to making power. Weird.

I saw that during the summer production during cloudy days was surprisingly high compared with the winter cloudy days.
I guess is because the sun elevation maybe? Probably the light has to cross less clouds because it incides more perpendicular during the summer.

 

[Crowz]

I saw that during the summer production during cloudy days was surprisingly high compared with the winter cloudy days.
I guess is because the sun elevation maybe? Probably the light has to cross less clouds because it incides more perpendicular during the summer.

Its possible. I know during the winter I wasn't making much at all when the clouds rolled in.

 

[shopman]

It's because of the time of year and angle of the sun.

 

[OffGridForGood]

It seems to be the angle, and also the hours of daylight are longer in the summer.
The two things together allow more solar for more hours during summer. At my latitude the summer days are up to 18 hours, but the winter ones are less than 8.
Even in low light cloudy days, having ten extra hours to collect something and ten less hours of using power with zero incoming PV sure makes a lot of difference. - it was cloudy here yesterday, but still collected 37kWh for the day, which is my average daily power usage so all good!.

 

[Crowz]

I have mine set at the year round sweet spot angle I found when using different online panel angle calculators.

Finally getting enough panels is why it started charging clouded over. The reason I posted this was how pleased I was to hit that spot finally and how surprised I was that it jumped so much while cloudy. Its like reaching a saturation point where enough area is gathering light or something vs what I had.

I expected it to climb slowly as I added panels but it overshot my estimations big time.

Something like (all made up numbers from here) making 500 watts cloudy and doubling the panels should get me 1000 watts cloudy but instead adding less than double and making 3kw of power while cloudy

That's the kind of effect I got.

Power while not cloudy climbed exactly as expected. Only the cloudy part was surprising.