Balcony solar: calculate the yield
A balcony solar kit usually hangs vertically on the railing and faces wherever the balcony happens to face. The SolarFinder calculator computes exactly that: an 800 watt inverter, modules at 90 degree tilt, your location, your direction – hour by hour with irradiation data from PVGIS.
Choose the direction of your balcony. The calculator opens with starting values for a typical 800 watt kit with two modules (0.8 kWp), without storage and without feed-in tariff, for a household consuming 2,000 kWh a year. You can change everything on the sliders afterwards.
Which way does your balcony face?
South South-east South-west East West
The “Total cost” is preset to the shop price of a kit matching the chosen size, or an estimate if there is none – enter the price of your offer and the payback will be right.
What an 800 W balcony kit delivers
| Balcony faces | Yield per year | of which used directly | Saving at 35 ct/kWh |
|---|---|---|---|
| South | 586 kWh | 415 kWh | €145 |
| South-east | 561 kWh | 408 kWh | €143 |
| South-west | 535 kWh | 391 kWh | €137 |
| East | 432 kWh | 343 kWh | €119 |
| West | 401 kWh | 331 kWh | €116 |
| For comparison: south, tilted 35° | 840 kWh | 522 kWh | €182 |
In Hamburg the values are around 8 percent lower, in Munich around 6 percent higher. The calculator uses your own location.
800 watt inverter, up to 2,000 watt peak of modules
In Germany a balcony kit (“Steckersolargerät”) may feed up to 800 VA into the home circuit under Section 8 (5a) EEG and have modules with up to 2,000 watt peak in total. It is only registered in the Marktstammdatenregister, within one month of commissioning; no notification to the grid operator is needed. A Schuko plug is permitted under the standard DIN VDE V 0126-95, but new devices with a household plug are limited to 960 watt peak. As of 09/2026; other countries have their own rules.
More modules than 800 watt peak still add yield vertically on a balcony, because full power is rarely reached: in Frankfurt, 2.0 kWp on 800 W facing south deliver around 1,310 kWh a year, and only around 150 kWh are clipped.
Modules vertical on the railing
Facing south, vertical modules deliver around 70 percent of what the same modules would produce at a 35 degree tilt. In return they deliver more in winter: a quarter of their annual yield falls in November to February, compared with a sixth for tilted modules.
The direction of the balcony
South is best; south-east and south-west lose only 4 to 9 percent. East and west balconies deliver a quarter to a third less, but a larger share of the morning or evening power is used directly. A north balcony is not suitable.
Shading
The balcony above, your own parapet, the house opposite: no calculator knows about shading, not even PVGIS, which only considers the terrain horizon. Watch from when to when the sun reaches the spot – if it is only free from 1 pm, a south balcony loses around 40 percent of its yield.
All figures, the rules, shading and registration in detail: Guide: balcony solar – calculating yield and orientation
Data basis: the calculator shows an immediate estimate from a latitude model and, once loaded, calculates with PVGIS hourly values (EU JRC, weather year 2019, 18% system losses). For vertical east and west balconies the first estimate is 10 to 25 percent too high; the PVGIS value is what counts.