How Solar Works
Solar panel systems are composed of three main components: solar panels to capture sunlight and convert it into electricity, inverters to make that electricity usable in your home, and racking systems to hold everything on your roof. To cap it all off, solar installations will usually come with an app so you can track and monitor the performance and health of your system, ensuring everything is doing what it’s supposed to.
That’s it! Pretty simple.
The best part about installing solar panels on your roof is that there are no moving parts. Unlike your car, which requires frequent maintenance due to all the pieces moving all the time, solar installations don’t require much maintenance. For the most part, you can ‘set it and forget it’.
Here’s what you need to know about the way each of these components work:
Solar panels
Each ray of sunlight contains a lot of energy. So much so, that when it hits certain materials, it can cause electrons in those solid materials to start to wiggle and move about. We’ve known about this effect for ages. In fact, Einstein’s Nobel prize is for his discovery of the photovoltaic effect, and scientists first designed solar cells to capture this energy in the 1950s.
These days, solar panels are composed of dozens of smaller, square-shaped silicon solar cells that are specially optimized to convert as much of the energy in sunlight into moving electrons as possible. These cells have circuitry wired throughout them in order to capture that flow of electrons, and concentrate it to be more powerful and useful.
Inverters
When you plug your phone charger or any other appliance into a socket in your home, what comes out is alternating current (or AC) electricity. But solar panels generate direct-current electricity, which is not usable in your home. So in order to actually make use of the electricity produced by your solar panels, you need to invert the electricity from DC to AC.
That’s where the aptly named solar inverter comes into play. There are two main types of inverters, which are really only different in terms of where they make that change: microinverters make the conversion at each individual solar panel (they’re installed as a device behind each panel), whereas string inverters first aggregate all of the DC output of the panels and then invert it all at once, in a single unit likely on the side of your house.
Racking systems
Racking and mounting systems are the pieces of hardware that actually attach solar panels to your roof. They’re designed to withstand hurricane force winds and are strong enough to stand on. Today’s racking systems are low profile and help with wire management on the roof, contributing to the overall aesthetics of the install. And our go-to-racking equipment includes top-of-the-line technology that is certified leak-proof.
Your solar app
Your solar app is how you’ll interact with your solar panel system. It’s how you can see when and how much electricity your solar panels are generating. Unless you have other home energy products integrated with your solar panel system though, like an EV charger or a home battery, there isn’t much you can do in these apps outside of track solar production.
Questions? Send us an email and we’ll do our best to answer any questions you have about solar!