About SolarTI83
I've spent my career working in the solar industry — designing systems, running site assessments, crunching production numbers, financial modeling, and helping people figure out if solar makes sense for them. Solar modeling can be confusing, and I've found that a lot of simple tools just don't exist, or they are buried inside expensive software.
So I started building my own.
SolarTI83 is a growing collection of free solar tools and calculators built for anyone who needs them — whether you're a solar professional, a homeowner trying to understand what that sales rep just told you, a student working on a class project, wondering if the sun is going to be in your face during the big game, or just someone curious about how the sun moves across the sky.
What's here now
The site currently features an interactive solar position calculator that gives you real-time sun azimuth, elevation, and path data for any location on Earth. You can visualize the sun's track across the sky in both 2D and 3D, scrub through the full day with a time slider, and select your location on an interactive map.
There's also a tide and currents tool. Yes, tides have nothing to do with solar — but the author is a sailor, and finding straightforward tide data online is harder than it should be. So I built something simple.
What's coming
This is a one-person project that I build on nights and weekends, so things roll out as I get to them. On the roadmap:
- Solar production estimators for residential systems
- Financial calculators to help homeowners decide if solar is actually worth it
- A shadow analysis tool for site assessments
- Optimal panel tilt and orientation tools
- Golden hour and blue hour calculators for photographers
- A residential solar proposal reviewer to help you make sense of what installers are quoting you
If there's a tool you wish existed, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.