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The amount of hours from sunrise to sunset is equal to the total sunlight hours in a 24 hour period. Similarly, peak sun hours are the amount of total sunlight hours in a 24 hour period that are strong enough to provide power from being captured by a solar panel. Not every hour of sunlight delivers the same amount of energy resources. The sunlight at sunrise does not provide as many resources as the amount of sunlight mid-day. Thus, looking at the average peak sunlight hours for Camp Douglas is valuable for calculating your solar needs.

Sunlight hits the earth directly at the equator. This is why the equator has a latitude of zero degrees. The latitude of Camp Douglas is 43.9. Knowing the latitude of Camp Douglas can help you plan for your solar panel setup, as the larger the latitude the more variance you will see throughout the year for total daily sunlight hours.

Throughout the day the sun obviously moves throughout the Camp Douglas sky. The suns position in the sky also changes throughout the year with the seasons. A fixed solar panel does not accommodate for these changes. However, a 1-axis panel rotates and follows the sun’s path during the day. A 2-axis panel both follows the sun’s daily path as well as the seasonal differences

Peak sun hours are greatly affected by weather patterns. Cloud coverage is a huge factor in peak sun hours per day because heavy cloud coverage will diminish the power of the solar insolation. You can use historical climate data to estimate average cloud and weather coverage, but it will obviously vary slightly from year to year.

We can use previous years of data to estimate the amount of peak sun hours in Camp Douglas. A fixed tilt mount for example will receive 4.1 average hours per day. For more efficiency for your system in Camp Douglas you could use a 1-axis tracking mount and increase your daily peak sun average to 5.2 hours, or even further with a 2-axis panel to get an average of 5.5 hours.