What I meant is there are plenty of photons that don’t make it through windows, both by intentional design and just natural material properties. So, there is potential to make use of that.
I just noticed a few comments up I accidentally said ‘block all of the light’ and what I really meant to say was ‘some of the light’. Kinda messed up my whole point there.
there are plenty of photons that don’t make it through windows, both by intentional design and just natural material properties. So, there is potential to make use of that.
Sure, but a solar panel of the same size on the wall next to the window capturing 100% of the light is already (100-VLTrating) more effective than the solar window. Bring mounted vertically on a wall makes it like 25% as effective as the same panel placed on the ground, which makes it like 50% as effective as a properly mounted panel on a roof.
So assuming you’ve what would be a 100W potential equivalent panel on a 50%VLT window, you’re getting 6.25W out of that 100W, and that’s assuming that these 50VLT windows panels operate just as efficiently as a conventional panel, which I’m gonna guess they don’t, but I don’t have rough numbers for that particular comparison.
Unless the window panel somehow outperforms the efficiency of a conventional panel (doubtful), it’s going to just be a huge waste of money, and if it does outperform the conventional panel, we’d just mount a 0VLT “window” like a conventional panel and still get over 4x the production. It’s a patently ridiculous idea that takes literal seconds to determine it’s a waste of time and money, and mere minutes to do the math to show it.
Before you tear apart my numbers, yes, I did ballpark the efficiency of those angles. I’d did a lot of math calculating a roof mounted vs free standing fixed vs free standing single axis movable vs free standing dual axis movable mounts for a solar pergola that I want to build but lack the funds to setup, so I know roughly how much power you get out of panels at different angles. The numbers are ballparked, but feel free to use whatever actual efficiency numbers you can find, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find real-world values that put the window above 10% of the total output of a traditional panel.
What I meant is there are plenty of photons that don’t make it through windows, both by intentional design and just natural material properties. So, there is potential to make use of that.
I just noticed a few comments up I accidentally said ‘block all of the light’ and what I really meant to say was ‘some of the light’. Kinda messed up my whole point there.
Sure, but a solar panel of the same size on the wall next to the window capturing 100% of the light is already (100-VLTrating) more effective than the solar window. Bring mounted vertically on a wall makes it like 25% as effective as the same panel placed on the ground, which makes it like 50% as effective as a properly mounted panel on a roof.
So assuming you’ve what would be a 100W potential equivalent panel on a 50%VLT window, you’re getting 6.25W out of that 100W, and that’s assuming that these 50VLT windows panels operate just as efficiently as a conventional panel, which I’m gonna guess they don’t, but I don’t have rough numbers for that particular comparison.
Unless the window panel somehow outperforms the efficiency of a conventional panel (doubtful), it’s going to just be a huge waste of money, and if it does outperform the conventional panel, we’d just mount a 0VLT “window” like a conventional panel and still get over 4x the production. It’s a patently ridiculous idea that takes literal seconds to determine it’s a waste of time and money, and mere minutes to do the math to show it.
Before you tear apart my numbers, yes, I did ballpark the efficiency of those angles. I’d did a lot of math calculating a roof mounted vs free standing fixed vs free standing single axis movable vs free standing dual axis movable mounts for a solar pergola that I want to build but lack the funds to setup, so I know roughly how much power you get out of panels at different angles. The numbers are ballparked, but feel free to use whatever actual efficiency numbers you can find, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find real-world values that put the window above 10% of the total output of a traditional panel.
On the move but looking forward to reading - thanks for taking the time