Here you can find Solar Panels and technological accessories related to Solar Energy: Click Here If you want to learn about Solar...
Here you can find Solar Panels and technological accessories related to Solar Energy: Click Here
If you want to learn about Solar Panels, to advise you before buying or to build your own Solar Panel: Click Here
this will be the first of my solar power focus videos due over the coming months seeing whether the much wanted sun power brand solar cells are worth the price [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] what i have here is a normal 100 watt monocrystalline solar panel and then two 50 watt sun power panels what i'm looking to do is see how they perform in different sorts of conditions and in particular in the quite poor quality winter light that we have here in the uk those discerning individuals who have been following my expedition lifeboat conversion episodes will know that there's impending excitement as i mount a set of four 100 watt flexi panels on the side of allen i've gone for a basic brand with a decent reputation dokio which are apparently also found inside other generic panels it's one of these 100 watt panels marketed as semi-flexible that i'll be using as a straightforward affordable benchmark against which to compare a premium solar array their initial build quality appears encouraging but this test isn't about long-term reliability i know that many solar aficionados can be cautious about how long flexible panels last in the real world it weighs roughly a kilo so a couple of pounds with a maximum output of 18 volts and about 5 amps and it can be part of an array totaling a thousand volts should you have a spare field in which to plug dozens of them together although oddly this contradicts dokio's recommendation to only tether eight together presumably they are concerned about the controllers and the batteries downstream and less so about the actual panels but this is the solar tech that i'm really trying to get a sense of the slickly marketed and reassuringly expensive maxion panels from sunpower these are a pair of 50 watt panels which combined in series can offer up to 38 volts at up to 3 amps they're only very slightly flexible set into a stiff plastic board and they weigh about twice as much as the dokio what for what aside from the toughness claims and so on it's the efficiency that is what drives the justification to charge more than two pounds sterling per watt as a pack of four my dokio cost about 60 pence per watt i'm guessing the difference will be similar over on the other side of the atlantic sun power state around 22 to 25 better performance especially in poor light this is going to be the first of the two tests and although i am going to be using an mppt and a pwm to see how they both get on this isn't the direct head-to-head between those two types of charge controller this is really about the panels themselves what i want to see is whether the generic brand versus the maxion cells in the sun power actually make a big difference they claim a distance of around 20 percent particularly in poor light conditions and that's exactly what we have here in the uk in the winter time this is my very basic test rig i'm going to use both a pwm and an mppt controller so we can account for any differences being potentially down to the way the solar power is being handled and not just being down to the panels themselves i'm not dragging around a car battery so my battery of choice here is a little 12-volt lithium-ion phosphate battery one that can easily handle charging current up to and a bit over seven amps it's at a lowest state of initial charge one comment i am going to slide in is that most panels seem to come with very stiff unwieldy cables i'm used to hyper flexible silicon ones with a very high strand count anyway to the results i've tried to make sure i took readings close together so the sunlight was consistent and avoiding fleeting moments when sun directly hit the panels we'll do the pwm and the docu first and the initial thing you'll notice is the poor output in cloudy winter light and not angled towards the sun you're only getting a few watts it was stable at about 0.3 amps and the voltage was 17 volts so we were squeezing out 4 watts let's change over to the sunpower maxians here it kept on flicking between 0.4 and 0.5 amps but this is with the voltage across the panels of well over 30 volts regardless the controller is only giving the battery the 14-ish volts that are necessary to charge it it would have been nice to get current readings to another decimal point of accuracy but let's assume that it was averaging 0.49 amps so nearly 7 watts the difference here is around 40 percent the maxions working more efficiently in a difficult test and it's not using the sort of charge controller where a higher array voltage can really be harnessed speaking of which the controller my mppt with its snazzy bluetooth connection gives us a lot more information and so let's go for the dokio once again here we're bouncing backwards and forwards between 0.5 and 0.6 amps so 10 watts are being offered up to the battery let's put aside the benefits of the controller for now and have a look at how the sunpower maxions got on again the voltage reflects the fact that we're looking at two panels together in series but interestingly the mppt which is keen on higher voltages manages about 20 improvement on the doxio panel roughly the stated claim we were getting between 12 and 13 watts from the array that can potentially give you 100 watts this will hopefully give you a real-world sense of whether it's worth the extra cash to go with maxion purely from a low light conditions perspective people making videos in the mojave desert in mid-summer can deal with tests when it's actually sunny i'm not good in the heat i'll get more solar charge episodes for you soon but until then bye [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you ...
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