My Giant Sun Flower (Redux)

The year before we constructed our house, my wife and I set stakes in the earth (in the exact footprint of our future home) at the site where we planned to build.  We then monitored how the sun path seasonally changed relative to the orientation of our house.  We wanted to assure that the placement of the house was pleasing to our eye, but, at the same time, we tried to face the house so that the winter sun would shine in through the front windows and the summer sun would slide overhead without introducing extra heat in through the windows.

We achieved just that.

When engineering my solar array, I tried to maximize the harvest of sunlight.   Equally as important, I wanted an array that “felt” more organic than a typical array.  That’s how I ended up welding arms on the main pole.

I wanted a flower.

About two months ago, I removed the modules from the arms and altered the orientation of the arm modules to increase the harvest of sunlight.  The alterations required a bit of rewiring and the cutting and welding of the rigid pipe on both arms.  I am pleased with the results.  This morning, I went out and took a photograph of early sunlight finding the “sunrise” arm.  As the sun climbs, the main array and the “sunset” arm will begin to experience full irradiation.

During the summer months the array still suffers from a bit of self-shading where the main array shades (and limits power production) on the arms.  During the winter months, as the sun path shifts to the South, the shading is not such an issue.

--Mitchell Hegman