Do Solar Panels Cool Attic

By shading your roof solar panels can lower the temperature of your home by several degrees.

Do solar panels cool attic.

This is a solar panel supplying free electricity to the attic fan under the silver dome on the rear roof. Do solar panels keep your roof and attic cooler. Before considering solar attic fans you will want to think about how much direct sunlight your solar panel will receive each day. They don t show the attic temperatures here but if the shingles are cooler the attic is cooler.

The fan blades spin but they don t lower the attic temperature at all. Installing solar panels will block this sunlight from hitting your roof thereby preventing heat from entering your house. Air movement can be a significant problem with some models. According to a team of researchers at the uc san diego jacobs school of engineering the solar panels sprouting on increasing numbers of residential and commercial rooftops around the world aren t.

The researchers found that solar panels can lower a roof s temperature by 5 degrees fahrenheit or about 3 degrees celsius. You can read more about this in fsec s literature review of attic ventilation pdf. The graph is from page 30. White shingles reflect more of the incident solar radiation and stay cooler.