microfiber solar loss
I had my Boulder 200 panels hooked up to my Yeti 1000 charging it up today. Since the panels were dusty my wife was wiping them off while I was checking the info on the screen. I was getting about 130 charging watts after she had wiped them all down. I was happy with that. I then noticed that when she was wiping certain areas of the panels, we lost more power than at other areas. So, I decided to try an experiment I took the cloth and flattened out at different areas of both panels. the cloth is 12" X 14". Strangely enough when the cloth was placed at each of the Boulder 200 outside corners, I lost the least amount of power. Which has approx. 20 watts. However, when it was placed between the 2 panels top or bottom, I lost the most! At approx. 80 watts. There was a significant amount of power loss in the center rather than on the sides; Even though the cloth took up the same amount of space on the different places on the panels. Both panels were using the connected legs at the same angle. Why would that be?
Comments
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Solar panels are made of an arrangement of solar cells. The cells are connected to each other to complete a circuit to provide power. To meet the requirements of the Yeti, some of the cells are wired in Series and others in Parallel. Some of the parts of those circuits are more vulnerable to shade than others depending on what part of the circuit the cells are in. I do not have access to the exact circuit diagram of the Boulder 200s but I would think this might have some factor in why the center is more responsive to shade. Larger panels like the Ranger 300 have much less of a voltage drop and shading does less to the over all power. The same is true for adding more panels of the same model in parallel to the HPP input. It helps offset some losses if one is shaded.
