Google Sketchup

A short while back a colleague asked me for advice how to best install solar panels on his roof. He was afraid that the shadow cast by a dormer would decrease the output of the panels. At first I couldn’t convince him that it wouldn’t be a problem, but suddenly I had an idea.

A while ago I was experimenting with Google Sketchup (), a fun free application to create 3D drawings in a simple way. It’s possible to draw a simplified house literally in seconds. The program also offers the option of projecting shadows for every day of the year and every time of day. This makes it very easy to see if solar panels (or a solar hot water system) suffers from shade from parts of the house, trees or other buildings. Although a simulation like this can’t calculate any performance loss due to shading in kWh or MJ, but it can give a very good overview of locations on a building where it would definitely not be a good idea to install solar panels.

I’ll try to give some tips in this article how to construct simplified buildings and quickly determine if solar panels in certain locations on those building suffer from shade effects. This will not be a complete Sketchup course, if only for the fact that I’m just a basic-level user myself.

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We’ve returned from our honeymoon, and a lot has happened while we were away. The Dutch national football team has made it to the finals of the world championship, despite many hours of talks and finding ourselves a month after the elctions we still don’t have a functioning cabinet, the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is still leaking much oil while not many people seem to paying attention anymore, the Solar Impulse has made its first night flight () and in Friesland the Frisian Solar Challenge () is in full swing.

Anywaym lots of things to read up on and lots of things to write about. During our honymoon I’ve read to very interesting (Dutch) books, De file voorbij – afscheid van het automobilisme by Kris Peeters (about which I’ve written before) and Privacy - Hoe Nederland verandert in een controlestaat by Rudie Kagie. I will write a short review of both books in the coming days.

The weather is very sunny and that means the solar panels are performing great. The hot weather somewhat depresses the peak power (solar cells are semiconductors whose electrical resistance increases with higher temperatures) but because the sun is above the horizon for a large part of the day, the sun is high in the sky and because of the excellent weather daily production is very high.

Of course the test drive review of the Tesla Roadster, which was kindly made available by The New Motion for use as our wedding car, is in the works. I hope to put several articles online in the coming few days, but with the weather we’re having, sitting behind my computer is not y first priority.