Test Out Your Home’s Solar Power Potential with RoofRay Online Solar Calculator
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 08.12.08
This video clip gives a demonstration on how the RoofRay online solar calculator works. Don’t adjust your speakers. There’s no sound.
Ever wonder what potential your roof has for solar power generation? Want to tinker around with different system configurations before even talking with a solar installer? If that’s you then RoofRay may be just the solution you've been waiting for.
What you do is: Enter an address so that a satellite image of your building pops up, draw your chosen solar array configuration, choose your roof tilt angle and hit calculate. From there you can look at the potential power of the system, power per square foot, financial data, etc.
Be Prepared to Tinker for a While
Obviously you’re going to have to put some time in to draw up your plans, know things about your house that perhaps the average homeowner doesn’t (roof angle in degrees?), and hopefully your house isn’t so newly built that it doesn’t yet show up on Google’s satellite imagery. As cool as this is, be prepared to tinker and play around with it. There’s no one-click button to generate your ideal configuration.
Assess Solar Potential of Different Homes Before Buying
Earth2Tech points out what is an interesting usage of the system: If you’re looking to buy a new home, you could use the RoofRay calculator to assess the solar potential of different buildings before purchasing.
Online Marketplace, “RoofRaytings” Planned
Though still at the beta stage of development, RoofRay hopes to create an online marketplace where solar installers can bid for your business, as well as create “RoofRaytings” of building’s solar potential for use in real estate search engines.
Anecdotally, the impetus for RoofRay came about when, in early 2008, “the founder’s utility bills started inching closer and closer to payment of a nice German sports-car. That’s just not right.”
UPDATE: One commenter has already reported that he has had problems with portions of the site. If you're playing around with it and come across problems, report them to RoofRay. I think this is really an interesting idea, but it appears there are some kinks still to be worked out.
via :: RoofRay and :: Earth2Tech
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Nice try, and a nice start, but the site is very buggy.
Will not pull up my utility info based on zip code.
Quick Calculation times out.
Bill Breakdown indicates that "No utility info could be found for your power company selected or zip code entered" then the calculation times out.
Please repost/update when the site actually works correctly.
I'd love to get some panels. I have great sun on my roof. It's full sun all day. Unfortunately, it'd take me 15 years to break even on the cost of the panels. So unless there's some kind of incentive, I just couldn't afford it.
One thing this tool does not do is factor in shading from trees or surrounding structures. These can significantly affect solar energy production.
It seems this tools is great for getting a general idea of how big a system you could install. But it is no substitute for having a qualified consultant or installer visit your site and do a more accurate calculation.
I tried the roofray on the southfacing roof of the main (mid) building of the White House and got these numbers assuming 40 degrees angle:
Potential: 99%
Power per Sq. Ft.: 12.93 Watts DC
Orientation 180 (due south)
Area: 6130 sq ft
Total peak power: 79246.09 Watts DC
ie. ca 80kW DC
You can always opt to finance the cost of your solar panels via a home equity loan, etc. Surely this will add X amount of dollars to your monthly mortgage payment. But then you can subtract X amount of dollars from your monthly electricity bill. In the end you may find that the savings on your electricity bill may completely offset the additional mortgage payment. This makes the pay-off immediate and completely justifiable.
Fantastic use of Google Maps. Turns out even my relatively small roof could provide most of my electricity needs, though it would take 14 years to pay off and I don't think I'll be living there that long.
I just wish they had more rate information for states other than California.