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CA_Traveler's avatar
CA_Traveler
Explorer III
Jan 23, 2016

Understanding Solar Irradiance for Solar Panels

In another thread it was suggested that you could use the University of Arizona at Tucson solar data to determine the maximum expected solar panel output at that location. Using that data from 1/20/16...
road-runner's avatar
road-runner
Explorer III
Jan 23, 2016
Try this calculator http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/

At my location it is pretty much dead on after 3 years of actual data. Being meant for grid tie systems, the default inverter efficiency is set to 96%. For a battery system I'd suggest changing that to 85% to account for charge controller and battery losses.

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