What direction do solar panels need to face in Australia?
So that’s an interesting one because north is best here in the Southern hemisphere, you want your panels facing north to generate the most power, however, what’s more important is that you generate enough solar power at the right time of the day.
So if you are not home in the middle of the day, but you the kids are home from school relatively early, and maybe mom’s a teacher or dad’s a tradie and they get home relatively early or whatever, we can face some panels west and so that way you can push some of that output later into the day.
If that’s when you want your electricity to be generated then that can be a really good thing and much more beneficial than having a big peak from like 12 to 2:00pm or so.
Similarly, if you want to have more electricity being generated early in the morning, then we can do that by facing the panels east.
So it depends a bit on when you want the electricity to be generated.
The other thing to keep in mind is the angle of the panels. If they’re flat they’ll generate more electricity in summer compared to the average. Or if they’re on a pitched roof such as a tile roof, then they’ll generate more power in winter compared to the average.
Finally, in terms of putting panels south, we can do that now that solar panels are so much cheaper. The worst-case scenario is a steep roof facing south because as you can imagine, the sun is lower in the sky to the north and so they don’t get much direct sunlight. But if you’ve got a roof that’s just south of west or south of east and it’s not too steep or even quite flat, then that’s fine.
We can definitely put panels on a south-facing roof and we are doing that more and more to max out the roof space to help you get as much electricity coming through as possible.
Leave a Reply