So, I've owned solar panels for quite a while now. 16 of them combined with Enphase microinverters, and this is performing nice, thanks to the current financial compensation regulation I'm not paying a dime for electricity on a yearly basis.
With the interest rates as low as 0.3% on my savings account, I decided it was time to invest more in solar panels on my house. Just to be ready for the future (Tesla, Heatpump, whatever).
Now, 16 panels is the max for one phase, so the first thing to do was run a new wire to the roof of the house. Not difficult, but a lot of work if you don't want the wire to be visible.
With that out of the way, I started my quest for mounting the new panels. With the 16 panels, the roof looks like this:
Now, I don't want a second row behind this row of 10 panels bacause that would mean to much shadow on the second row. So I decided to reuse the existing mounting system to fabricate an extension so that they can hold two panels at once in portrait mode, made from hard wood. This is the proof of concept:
Which turned out nice, so I filled the whole roof with that concept:
And with mounted panels it definitly looks better:
And performs even better, the new panels are 265Wp and coupled to Enphase M250 microinverters (the old ones are 215Wp with M215). On a good day in May my system generated almost 43 kilowatt hours of energy:
