Your solar panels are about to have their worst six months. That is exactly when a turbine starts earning its keep.
Almost every home energy decision gets made in summer. Long evenings, visible sun, panels at their best, and a quote that looks wonderful in July. Then April arrives, the days shorten, the bill climbs, and the roof goes quiet. It does not have to.
Wind and sun keep opposite calendars.
This is the part that surprises people, and it is not a marketing line — it is meteorology. In the temperate latitudes the wind is strongest across April to September, when the temperature contrast between pole and equator is at its sharpest and the storm track runs hardest. Sunshine does the exact opposite, peaking in December and January and bottoming out in the dark months.
The two resources are not competitors. They are out of phase. The weeks your panels give you least are the weeks the air outside is moving most.
Schematic. The shape of the year, not measured values — your own site decides the numbers.
Your bill keeps the same calendar as the wind.
Household electricity use is seasonal too, and it moves with the wind rather than the sun. Lights on at four in the afternoon. Heating and heat pumps working. More hours spent indoors, more cooking, more everything. In most of the countries we ship to, the heaviest domestic consumption of the year falls within April to September.
So the worst month for a panel is often the biggest month for a bill. A roof carrying only solar has been built for the half of the year when the bill is smallest. That is a strange way round, and almost nobody notices it, because the decision was made in July.
Build only the sunny half and you have built for the cheap half of your year.
What that means for one roof.
A battery does not care which machine filled it. Put a wind turbine and semi-flexible panels on the same roof, into the same battery, and the two curves fill in for each other: the panels carry the long days, the turbine carries the dark, windy ones. Neither has to be sized for the whole year on its own.
That is the entire argument for building both halves, and it is the reason we make both rather than making one and pointing at somebody else's.
Two machines, one battery, opposite seasons.
The windy season is also the storm season.
Here is the half of this that a seasonal sales piece would leave out. The months that generate best are the months that load your mounting hardest. More energy in the air means more force on the bolts, the mast and the roof structure underneath.
So April is the month to go up and check the installation, not just to enjoy the output. Torque the fixings. Look at the mast and the bracket for movement or corrosion, especially near salt air. Know how to brake the machine before a named storm arrives, and if you are somewhere that issues wind warnings, have the cover to hand and use it. Our blade sets are cut for real conditions — the six-blade Atlas set is rated 5–35 m/s and built for exposed coastal sites — but a turbine is only ever as sound as what holds it down.
The mast, the bracket and the pad underneath — the parts worth an hour before the windy months arrive.
A windy country is not a windy roof.
Everything above is the shape of the year in general. It is not a measurement of your house. A national wind map tells you about open ground at ten metres; your roof sits in the wind shadow of whatever is upwind of it — a taller neighbour, a line of trees in leaf, the ridge of your own building.
If you are near a coast, on a ridge, or on open farmland, the seasonal pattern above will probably show up on your roof much as it does on the chart. If you are inland in a dense street with mature trees, it may not show up at all. The only honest way to find out is to measure your own site through a windy season rather than trusting the map or trusting us.
Measure the roof you actually have, through the season that actually matters.
The sunny half is already covered on a lot of roofs. The windy half is the one still sitting unused — and it arrives in April.
Measure first. Then build the other half.
The seasonal chart on this page is schematic: it shows the phase relationship between wind, sunshine and household demand through a year, not measured values for any particular place, and we have deliberately put no numbers on it. Actual seasonality varies widely by latitude, terrain and local climate, and near the equator it is far weaker than shown. Every photograph here is our own, of our own products. The turbine figures are our published specifications and are checkable on the product page. For your own site, measure it — that is the only figure that decides anything.