Calculate the solar potential of your roof

Computers & Mobile Energy & Sustainability

The RoofRay site allows you to specify location, size and slope of your roof via Google Maps. It then uses this info to estimate how much energy can be generated from your available exposure. Though perhaps not terribly precise, it’s certainly helpful for familiarizing more people with some determining factors and maybe even making solar power planning a bit more fun (and viral!) – RoofRay [via Lifehacker]

2 thoughts on “Calculate the solar potential of your roof

  1. hovis says:

    I really like the quick estimates you can get from this site, but there’s some tiny things they could do to make it so much
    better.

    Firstly, they need to fix their algorithm, it’s broken. I have a flat roof, so why is it that when I set my pitch to 0deg that changing the direction of that slope affects my estimated wattage? A flat roof points UP, not south-east!

    They could make the red slope line’s length describe the pitch of the slope. (They should keep the slope widget they already have, but link the two in realtime.) This way people with complex roofs can “see” that different slopes match. Also, they should have an interactive display of how steep the slope they’ve picked is…

    We could also get a much better estimate from the system if it allowed us to describe how long (and what parts of the day) the sun shone on the each portion of the roof.

    Even better, they should publish and document the math they’re using to estimate sun exposure and wattage so that those of us who DID pay attention in math class can get some really precise numbers, or at least know how fuzzy the estimate is by knowing where our data limits us.

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