SolarMonkey

This gives me hope. My mother plant is huge and old now, probably 8 or so years, and I don’t take pups off it anymore. Can barely even move the thing outside in summer anymore. I’d love for it to bloom for me.

I considered mentioning the angled slide-down option, cuz that does work for a lot of applications, but I feel that having it slide off the panel face in a heavy sheet would be bad for it over time, cause scratches and stuff that scatter light and reduce efficiency. Maybe reduce it more than it would be reduced by heating it while it’s snowing heavily, or at least cause it to need replacement or servicing more often.

The snow problem isn’t really that much of a problem if you build for that in mind.

All the panels need is a small heat strip running through some part of it, maybe even behind the panel, added as aftermarket options, to melt it as it falls, and some sort of sensor to only kick heat on when it’s needed. They have things like that for led traffic lights already, so it would really just be repurposing something that already exists.

Sure that uses some electricity, reducing the overall efficiency, but 90+% of the year it’s not actively snowing hard enough to need to kick the heat on, so that’s a minimal loss.