My house is aligned exactly North-South, so I have no roof facing South. Is it worth installing solar panels? Are there any good options for dealing with this situation?
In your case you will need twice as many panels. This is because the panels on the west side of the roof will be in shade in the morning and the panels on the east side of the roof will be in shade in the afternoon, and a solar panel in the shade makes no power, or at least very little power. So right there you doubled the cost of an already too expensive system. Or you could build special stands to hold the panels facing south. It would be cheaper to just move to a house with better alignment!
The answer is NO. We can install PV solar panels to properties that are South East – South West facing. Of course it helps if you are 00% South facing but it’s not the end of the world. In fact I would say that the majority of solar panel installations across Britain are not 00% South facing.
Depends how much sun you get. Even if you don't face south, you could still be able to harvest a lot of energy from the sun. You could install panels transversely so they face south to increase sun exposure, but this might not look so nice. Or you could move your house to the Southern hemisphere, when your solar panels should face north. Or install miniature windmills on your roof instead.
The trouble is that it is so expensive to have installed and as you say it will take many years before you actually start saving above what the installation cost was, I personally would not go ahead and make that sort of investment, it would be more profitable to keep the money in a building society, get the interest from it and use that to pay for your electricity but the main thing that I have against solar Panels is that unless you stay in that house for at least twenty five years you will not reach the point where you are saving and to capitalise on it you would have to stay there for many years more, so you will not have the option of moving house without losing your investment and at the moment having solar panels does not increase the value of the property, it is just a good selling point, when you buy your new house, you would probably have to start all over again and then because of the years will never live long enough to reap any benefit from it.
Several options: The panels could be mounted on the ground. We mount panels on a roof because they are out of the way but it is not the best choice. The highest output (and most expensive) choice is to mount the panels on the ground fixed in a heliostat (sun tracking mechanism) Far better if the panels are on the ground where they can be more easily cleaned to promote top efficiency. If you have the room they can be mounted in an angled array. Panels can be mounted on the side of a house or on the roof using racks to position the panels properly. We usually say that if we can get the panels within 5 degrees of due south it is sufficient. You could even mount the panels flat onto the side of a house and use mirror mounted heliostats to reflect sunlight to them. All of these options will be more expensive than a perfectly oriented home. There are also other alternatives for producing electricity, conserving electricity through energy savings, or production of other forms of energy that offsets electrical usage. A site survey is the best way to determine this.
