Hi everyone, I hope you guys don't mind me registering to ask some questions...
To give you a little background - I'm off the grid in north-central CO full time. I have a 2800 rated watt PV array running through a trace and a couple of outbacks, charging a 16 battery bank made up of Rolls 530 amp hour lead acid batteries. As you'd probably guess, the system runs great.
Only issue we have is in December when the temp drops to about -20 overnight and hovers around -5 during the day. When it's that cold, even 2" of snow on the solar panels isn't going anywhere, even in bright sunshine at 9600'.
Since I have a bit of a panel access issue, I've been kicking around various ideas about how to deal with the snow besides climbing up and brooming it off. One thing that came to mind was that since the panels are so thin in most places, I might be able to run heat tape along the back of the panels with the idea that I could even run the tape off my generator. I'm concerned that this approach will either generate too much heat and damage the panels, or not enough heat and will have no effect on the snow load.
Anyone here play around with this idea at all?
Thanks guys!
To give you a little background - I'm off the grid in north-central CO full time. I have a 2800 rated watt PV array running through a trace and a couple of outbacks, charging a 16 battery bank made up of Rolls 530 amp hour lead acid batteries. As you'd probably guess, the system runs great.
Only issue we have is in December when the temp drops to about -20 overnight and hovers around -5 during the day. When it's that cold, even 2" of snow on the solar panels isn't going anywhere, even in bright sunshine at 9600'.
Since I have a bit of a panel access issue, I've been kicking around various ideas about how to deal with the snow besides climbing up and brooming it off. One thing that came to mind was that since the panels are so thin in most places, I might be able to run heat tape along the back of the panels with the idea that I could even run the tape off my generator. I'm concerned that this approach will either generate too much heat and damage the panels, or not enough heat and will have no effect on the snow load.
Anyone here play around with this idea at all?
Thanks guys!
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