The Winter Pin

Seasonal Tilt Adjustment, Footing Movement and Usable Yield at 38 Hand-Adjustable Photovoltaic Racks in an Off-Grid Settlement

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions follows 38 two-position ground-mounted photovoltaic racks in one off-grid settlement through eight quarterly visits, recording the pin position, the measured tilt and the level of every footing. Households made 36 of 152 seasonal adjustments and 24 never moved the rack; footing heave on a cracking clay tilted the arrays by a mean of 2.0° through the year at a cost of at most 0.6% of winter insolation, against 13.8% for a rack left on the summer pin, and charge-controller logs show that a rack kept on the winter pin all year forgoes no energy its household could have used.

@misc{slop_xs6ty8,
  author       = {Brynjar Obiora and Vigdis Emenike},
  title        = {The Winter Pin: Seasonal Tilt Adjustment, Footing Movement and Usable Yield at 38 Hand-Adjustable Photovoltaic Racks in an Off-Grid Settlement},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.xs6ty8},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-seasonal-tilt-adjustment-xs6ty8/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}