Originally Posted By: mlord

A steeper roof pitch would have been nice -- better solar gain as well as better for keeping the snow off. But rather more expensive too, so we passed on that.

A roof of 30 to 35 degrees is ideal for solar panels. I can't tell exactly from your photo, but it doesn't look that far off.

Also, do you already know which panels and inverter you will use? I leaned towards SunPower, but eventually settled for Silevo Triex T-series, because they seemed to be a better value for money. SunPower is more efficient even, but also a 10% more expensive - besides, if you've got roof space enough, efficiency isn't all that important). With regards to the inverter, I really wanted a system that was able to address the panels individually, because we have a lot of trees over here and one dirty panel (with leaves or otherwise) means the rest of the panels on the same string will also loose about half of their capacity.

I leaned towards the Enphase system, which uses one micro-inverter underneath every panel, and directly produces AC power. The reason for this was it decentralizes the setup eases the setup even. The downside, and reason I didn't went for this system in the end, was the monitoring system uses Powerline. That in itself isn't that bad, but the Enphase Powerline monitor didn't have a serial out, and I really wanted that because I wanted to connect it to my home automation setup. This was not possible with Enphase, alas. (I guess I could have used a Kwh counter with S0 output also now I think about it...) So in the end I went with a SolarEdge system. This system uses a bit of both: Power Optimizer boxes underneath each panel which hold all the intelligence, and one "dumb" centralized inverter, with all the connections I needed.
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Riocar 80gig S/N : 010101580 red
Riocar 80gig (010102106) - backup