Summary

Explain why the southern exposure is so important.

Sure. So the sun rises in the east and sets in the west pretty much, uh, you know, most people are, are aware of that. What most people don’t know is that the sun throughout the course of the day is pretty much always in the southern sky. So while it’s going east to west, it’s traveling through the southern sky.

In the wintertime, it’s more dramatically in the south because it’s lower in the sky than in the summer where it’s almost overhead completely.

So that southern exposure is really, really important if you’re gonna get any production during the winter.

Right, right. But conversely, if you have a whole bunch of big trees on the north side of your property, That’s not really, uh, any kind of a red flag or a mitigating factor to installing solar.

If there’s northern shading, it doesn’t really matter. Um, you know, it’s, it’s really important to be upfront with people, too. You know, a lot of companies see heavily shaded roofs and say they still give the same energy output in their estimates. Here’s our thing: you can spend your money any way you want to, but we’re gonna be honest and accurate about how much energy you’re gonna get out of this.

If you want to put up solar in a very heavily shaded area, we can do that, but we’re gonna let you know for sure the amount of energy that’s gonna be produced is gonna be significantly reduced. We have plenty of clients who fall into that environmentalist bucket who say, well, the expense is still worth it because I’m doing something and I applaud those people.

But to, to the solar installers out there who install in a highly shaded area, but don’t warn their customers of reduced output, you know, that again is something that hurts the industry.

Yeah, absolutely. And I speak alongside you that that’s a super big point of pride. I feel so confident in talking to people when I can say, hey, before we’re gonna install this, we’re gonna have an engineer come out to the house, they’re gonna fly a drone around, build a 3D model that we’re gonna put into our CAD software that’s gonna give us the proper shading analysis with decades of climate data and really make sure that your particular roof in your particular neighborhood in Philadelphia or Maryland or Delaware or New Jersey is gonna produce this much energy, not some panel sitting on a lab table somewhere under some special light.

This is real world circumstances and it feels like a major differentiating factor compared to a lot of the other players that, like you said, may just be really liberal and kind of aggressively positive about what they hope a system could potentially get.