Draw a Roof
With easy to use selecting tools, start by outlining your roof for your site plan. After defining this area, you can draw obstructions like vents or trees, simply outline areas you either don’t want modules. All of these obstruction areas will be included in the shade analysis. Be sure to define all height and setbacks of obstructions to properly accommodate for their shade impact. PVSketch will then help you calculate azimuth, slope and setbacks in seconds.
We are constantly updating and refining our PVSketch drawing tools to help make PVSketch faster, easier, and better for your everyday use. PVSketch now accommodates for shade loss, shade path, and wind zones in each system. To showcase this update, locate each obstruction layer on the site tab. At the bottom of the section, find the Data Layers and choose to toggle on or off shade loss, shade path and wind zones. This will create a display on your design after you generate it. You can see a visual effect representing the loss of production on each module, the area of shading for each module, and where to include more attachments on your design based on the wind impact.
The impact of the shade can be seen in the bottom ribbon. Annual production numbers are inclusive of the shade impact automatically. You can analyze the direct impact by using the Total Solar Resource Fraction (“TSRF”) which is the total number of sunlight the project will receive over the year factoring in the impact of shade.
