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Looking at the average peak sunlight hours in Weslaco is a valuable number for determining your solar power setup. Peak sunlight hours are only the hours a day in which the sunlight is strong enough for the solar panels to do their job. Not every hour of sunlight was created equal. For example, solar panels do not provide much use during early sunrise and sunset, and therefore you should not look at total hours of sunlight in a day, but instead focus on peak sunlight hours. Using this number will provide a much better estimate of your needs for setting up panels in Weslaco, Texas.

Sunlight hits the earth directly at the equator. This is why the equator has a latitude of zero degrees. The latitude of Weslaco is 26.2. Knowing the latitude of Weslaco 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 Weslaco 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 take the latitude of Weslaco and use that number to know the amount of total sunlight hours in the region from sunlight to sunset and estimate that with a fixed solar panel, Weslaco will receive 5.7 average peak sun hours per day. This number can be increased to 7.2 hours by using a 1-axis tracking mount, or 8 hours from a 2-axis tracking mount.