PV panels should ideally be mounted at an angle similar to your latitude, i.e. I'm at roughly 26 deg south, so the panels are mounted at 26 deg from horizontal.

As for cleaning, sewer/grey water pipes have a recommended slope to be self-cleaning - IIRC it's got to do with the velocity of liquid flowing along the pipe being sufficient to lift and transport the solids. It's similar for flat planes such as PV panels. Too flat/horizontal and the dirt won't get "picked up" and moved along with water flow.

Or something like that.

My installer recommended against a tracker. He said a tracker system would add roughly the equivalent of an additional 2 panels' output, at a similar cost, and an increase in complexity and maintenance.

I can drop my wallet onto a hard surface, from even higher than 1 metre, and it won't break. Neither will the cash inside it, ditto credit cards.

If "it's bulky, can be forgotten or lost" renders a wallet+contents unusable, then so does "I dropped my phone and it broke".

It's similar for video editing - one large, high-def monitor for the actual video, and another monitor for the various control panel windows. The second monitor can be any aspect ratio - whatever you prefer to work with - but the first one needs to be big, accurate, and has to be able to cope with at least the most common formats.

Shared the nobel prize with Fleming:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Invented Gardasil:
http://www.couriermail.com.au/...

Perhaps you should do some research before commenting - otherwise you run the risk of being perceived as a troll or a chickenhead.

At least once per month in recent months. "Your system must be restarted to complete installation of the updates"

I'd mod up you but I want to comment.

They'll get a rude shock if they try it in Australia.

That's interesting. It asks me to disconnect my wi-fi before clicking the "opt out" button. As I'm not a networking sage, can someone explain why this would be necessary?

where Gates & Jobs got all their ideas from.

I've recently set up the following linux distros as guests under Win 7 in VirtualBox (all are 64-bit versions):

Mint 17
Ubuntu 14.04
OpenSuse*
Mageia*

* whatever the latest version was on Distrowatch or Livecdlist

NONE of them were able to successfully restart themselves after initial installation. They shut down to a black window, and stayed that way until I forced VirtualBox to power them off. After a manual start, they would all start up and ask for updates. Mint, Ubuntu and Magiea were OK (after installing hundreds of MB of updates), OpenSuse just sat there doing nothing.

I'm not going to install any Linux/GNU distros on a customer's machine until I can get one to:

1. install and work in a VM, and then
2. install and work on generic desktop hardware, and 1st-tier laptop hardware.

Whoops, forgot about Scandinavia (blame my newly-acquired homebrew kegging system). I'm expressing dismay about the size of the welfare budget here in Oz, and my experiences with people who game the system. I've known professional tertiary students who were smart enough to claim and collect 2 or even 3 student allowances by using fake identities. They liked student life so much, it was preferable to going out and actually getting a job.

I receive some welfare myself, mainly an income supplement for dependent children, but I wish we could work out a better system.

We've a lot of evolving to do before socialism can work on a national scale. At the point where it becomes a government function to weigh in and distribute the wealth (e.g. with over-generous welfare handouts) it becomes a disincentive to work, i.e. if I can get free money from the government, why should I work?

Not in western Sydney.

I can see a rapid increase in the customer base of synthetic voice software

My installer said that tracking systems aren't really worth it for domestic situations. They cost about the same as 2 extra panels, and provide roughly the same amount of energy - so why not buy 2 extra panels and not have to deal with maintenance of motors, etc.

I thought that a tracking system could be set up to forego motors and use bi-metallic strips to drive the panel movement throughout the day - have the panels point east when "cold", i.e. in the morning, then bimetallic strips would warm with the sun, do their "bendy" thing and push the panels to point west throughout the day as they get warmer. Then overnight, as they cool off, they'd revert to their "cold" state and the panels would move to point east again, ready for the next day. I asked an engineer about this once but he thought bimetallic strips wouldn't be powerful enough to do the job.