Additionally, winter months are usually the cloudy ones. It's not very uncommon to have just a couple of sunny days per month in European winters, driving down solar gains even if there's no snow cover.
Additionally, winter months are usually the cloudy ones. It's not very uncommon to have just a couple of sunny days per month in European winters, driving down solar gains even if there's no snow cover.
In climates where you will have a bed of snow during the winter months, your optimum tilt angle for a fixed solar panel is something like 30° off of vertical or steeper. I find that on mine the snow falls off since it is a south facing, steep, dark surface.
You engineer to make sure you have enough energy captured each month to meet that months needs. That might lead you to a tilting mount, or just a fixed angle and having surplus energy most months.
In my case, panels were much more expensive when I designed my system, I initially roof mounted them, but when replacing the roof under them I moved them to a pole and went with a tilting mount and manually move the panels twice a year. My load is much higher in the summer, but I still need some power in the winter. And northern winters can be cloudy a lot and have limited sun even on a clear day. At my location there is about a factor of 5 difference in solar energy per square meter per month. So you design for each month and then pick a solution that is best. In my case the summer load is so high that even though I get 5 times the energy, it is still the driving force on sizing the system.
During summer months the production mostly covers and partly exceeds their use, but the sell price is so much lower that it doesn't even begin to pay for the rest of the year. But that of course then relates to the installed capacity.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/03/18/heating-solar-panels-...