South West Facing Roof Solar Panels

The diagram shows how the sun passes over a house with solar panels on the south and west facing roof surfaces.

South west facing roof solar panels.

I would be grateful for any thoughts suggestions on the direction to face solar panels. The flatter a south facing roof is i e. At lower pitches say 30 the east west facing panels perform slightly closer to south. The sun rises at 5 52 am and begins directly shining on the south facing panels at 8 15.

In general solar panels that are oriented directly east or directly west will produce about 20 percent less electricity than if they were facing south. Debating on a having part of my solar panels 6 out of 20 facing west to catch some sun in the winter or b am i better off making more sun all facing south and banking that extra power made in a partial credit from the electric company for use in the winter time. Even with this decrease in performance solar panels will produce enough electricity to save you hundreds of dollars a year. The closer to horizontal the better it will be for solar.

At higher pitches the difference increases. We are looking at installing a 5kw system lg neon 2 panels and fornius inverter on a double storey house and had initially thought of splitting the panels between our north east and west facing roofs so that we got production over most of the day 8 panels north 4 east and 4 west. The results backed us up on this theory showing poor. We assumed a 40 elevation for the roof.

An example of a south west facing roof. Why orientation matters with rooftop solar. We also took at look at a tilt angle of 40 for the south facing orientations mainly just to show that a south facing roof with a steep pitch is probably not a good place for solar panels.