New toy: solar radiation sensor

[xsnrg]

Last night I finished up installing the solar radiation sensor on my weather station.  It will be fun to track and share...

If anyone is interested, my weather page:  http://www.howardweb.org/weather

and in particular, the solar radiation page:  http://www.howardweb.org/weather/solar

Jim

[Doug]

Very Nice! but that forecast is cold.

[xsnrg]

yessir it is... but at least it is cloudy.   

[Westbranch]

We could almost swap forecasts, yet  at opposite sites...

http://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/bc-76_metric_e.html

[boB]

We could almost swap forecasts, yet  at opposite sites...

http://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/bc-76_metric_e.html

Is Williams Lake, BC  where you live ?   Pretty neat place !

boB

[Westbranch]

boB, Yes, living in WL Lk, but to avoid confusion, Avatar is from our new build at the lake

[xsnrg]

How clouds take a bite out of a sunny morning

[RossW]

How clouds take a bite out of a sunny morning

Don't they just! That's very similar to what I'm doing here too.
I use an Apogee Instruments pyranometer as my sensor, and plot it thus:


I read it every second, but record and plot every 5 mins.
The blue (area) is the average over the 5 mins.
The red line is the peak power during the 5 minutes.
The green line is my calculated (theoretical) power available at this lat/long at this time of day on this day of the year.
The black line is an cosine-adjusted value of what the incident radiation would be if I could point my panels straight at the sun (and since most of my arrays are on trackers, that's me).

I do some more calculations based on what I am actually measuring vs what "should be available" to know if I have a problem, or have "opportunity power" available.