What about the Winter?

Do solar panels work in the Winter?
I mean there's a bunch of snow on them, right? How can they possibly get light, which is what powers them, when they are covered in snow? The short answer is yes, they do work in the winter.

During the day, when they're producing, the solar panels heat up and that melts the snow. For instance today it's snowing outside side, but it's like 0° C and the snow's just melting as soon as it hits the ground. The same thing happens with the panels. It just melts and they keep producing. If it snows at night, and it's just a little light snow and some light can still get through, then it'll heat up and start to melt the snow when the light starts hitting it.

If it's a heavier snow however, you need to clear one third of the panel in order to get it to heat up, and then the rest of it will just slide off. In order to do this you can use a telescopic roof rake, rubber ones not hard ones. A couple popular brands are Snow Pro and Snow Joe, and there's some generic ones you can get at Canadian Tire.

As for ground mounted systems, nowadays they have bi-facial panels that can produce from the back, which can actually start the production so that's going to help a lot with it melting and sliding off.

BUT one thing to know is that you don't really have to clear them off at all. If they get covered you're not missing out on that much. We only get like 6 hours of daylight some days in the winter and it's not direct either. It's not like in the Summer where the sun's hitting the panel straight on. You're not losing that much at all if you don't remove the snow.

The majority of the production comes in the spring, summer, and fall. So if it goes a couple days, or even the whole Winter without clearing you're not missing out on much.

They actually did a side by-side test in Alberta with a bunch of panels at different angles and they found the difference was only about 3% of the total for the year. So overall it's not that big a deal.
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