It snowed in the night and the there was a couple of centimetres left on the roof on the morning of April 11th. I had to go to work and didn't have time to clear it, so there's an opportunity to see how much less electricity we generated and the value of clearing snow.
Here's a comparison between the generation on the snow-covered day with the day before, which was otherwise similarly sunny.
It looks like the snow was still there until around 9 o'clock, stopping the rays of the sun reaching the panels, and stopping any chance of the heat melting it from beneath.
| time | Generation / kWh | ||
| 11th | 10th | Loss | |
| 6:00 | 0.0 | 0.6 | 0.6 |
| 7:00 | 0.1 | 2.0 | 1.9 |
| 8:00 | 0.4 | 3.1 | 2.7 |
| 9:00 | 4.0 | 4.9 | 0.9 |
| 10:00 | 5.9 | 6.0 | - |
| total loss | 4.1 | ||
The total loss was 4.1 kilowatt hours and we're getting 48 yen per kWh, so that's a couple of hundred yen. Is it worth spending five minutes clearing snow off the bottom of the roof for that?
