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
I'm about to connect 800 WS of solar panels to this portable power station whose solar input rating is 600 W this is called over paneling and before we over panel not one but two different Power stations I own we have to talk about how I over panel safely so that I don't damage my expensive power stations so just to start I'm plugging a 100 W panel into this small power station which I know I can do safely because the solar panel specs are within all the power station solar input ratings of voltage current and wattage but because I know most power stations can be over paneled the question becomes which of these ratings can I exceed safely well for starters voltage is a hard limit the voltage range refers to the solar array open circuit voltage which should always remain within that limit so if I was to wire these two panels in series it would sum their voltages which I can find on the back label where it says open circuit voltage the bigger panel has a vocc of 24.3 and the smaller one has a vocc of 21.5 so we should get something around 44 45 volts look at that so wiring these two panels in series definitely exceeds this power station's 30 volt input limit you should also account for temperature when you're calculating your solar arrays maximum open circuit voltage so I'll put a link in the description to this calculator it's uh on my site and it's free to use and it helps you do that regardless we cannnot over panel this power station by wiring these two panels in series so yes voltage is a hard limit we cannot exceed but that brings me to a power station's current and wattage ratings exceeding these is the basis of over paneling because they are usually not hard limits I won't say they're always not hard limits because there are so many power stations out there and it's really hard to make a blanket statement like that but in order to exceed them safely we need to do some due diligence the whole purpose of this due diligence is to find out how much we can exceed the power stations stated current and or wattage limits by if at all you might think to start by looking in the product manual or online just to see what other people's experiences have been but I highly recommend you go directly to the source and email the brand I reached out to a few different brands for this video and we'll hear from one of them in just a sec we'll also see how sometimes the brands themselves are not even that clear let's start with ecoflow since that's the brand of Power Station we are trying to over panel when I reached out asking if the stated current and or wattage limits can be exceeded customer support got back to me saying that you cannot exceed 20% of the upper limit had had to follow up and they specified that was referring to the upper current limit so if I'm understanding them correctly we can exceed the 8 Amp current limit by 20% Which would put let's call it the over panel current limit I'm just making that term up at 9.6 amps in another email they did imply that this was referring to the shortcircuit current so for this power station I'll try to keep my solar arrays shortcircuit current below 9.6 amps but frankly customer support was not very clear clear and if you're wondering what the 8 amp rating even refers to then it's usually the max current that the power station will accept so if my panels were capable of producing let's say 8.5 amps of current for instance then the power station would limit the current to just 8 amps and we'll see an example of this later on that all being said for me in this case I do feel comfortable over paneling this slightly while staying within that 9.6 amp shortcircuit current limit from my solar panels and if you're like what the heck does that mean well solar panels also have a shortcircuit current rate on the back label and when you wire solar panels in parallel like I've just done using a pair of mc4 Branch connectors then it sums their currents and normally the voltage would stay the same if you're using identical solar panels but because I'm using different solar panels the open circuit voltage of the array becomes that of the lowest rated panel which in this case is the 21.5 volts from this smaller panel so this array has a shortcircuit current of 8.16 amps which is above the stated current rating but it's actually below that over paneled current rating that the customer support told us about and it has a vocc of 21.5 which is within the 30 volt limit so let's plug it in and see what happens I had to move it into the shade to see it a little better but it is maxing out at a charging rate of 94 Watts there's a little shade from this panel on that panel so I'm going to move it getting a Max of 99 Watts we're not getting the full 150 watts obviously solar panels rarely output their rated power but don't forget because these are different solar panels wired in parallel we're actually not going to get the 150 watts Max because this uh solar panels VOC is pulling down the voltage of the entire array but still we're getting 99 Watts which is a lot more than we'd be getting if we were just using the one 100 watt panel so we are getting faster solar charging that's the benefit of over paneling I actually quickly want to check what we'd get from just the one panel so I'm going to disconnect these 69 Wat from the 100 wat panel by itself so an extra 30 Watts from adding the 50 wat panel which is pretty good so we've covered voltage and current but what about wattage most times the wattage limit refers to the max amount of Watts that the power station will ever pull from the solar array that's connected to it so even if my 150 watt solar array was capable of producing let's say 130 watts in really good conditions then the max amount that my River 2 would accept would be 110 watts and this is called clipping and we'll see an example of this later on luti is one of the brands I reached out to for this video and they confirmed that that's how their power station wattage ratings work it's basically a max amount that the unit will ever pull so they said an example of let's say a unit has a 200 watt solar input limit and you connect a solar panel that can output 500 watts uh the unit will only accept 200 watts and the extra 300 watts will be clipped Okay so we've talked about how to approach over paneling in a safe way but before we over panel this bigger power station here what happens if we do it with this one in a risky way you might run into some examples of people doing this online so I'm going to connect 200 WTS of solar to mine and we are going to see what happens all right connected it okay it has settled around 109 Watts so probably it's at that there it is that 110 watt input limit and now we're seeing clipping happening where the power station is actually only accepting a max of10 watts despite the array's ability to Output more but look at that this this uh solar array right here uh has a shortcircuit current of close to 10 amps and despite going over that you know 9.6 amp limit that customer support told me about we are having no issues personally my thoughts are this is a bit risky you know you don't know it might work in the short term but in the long term it could potentially damage your power station uh so I'm not going to be doing this that much longer but just wanted to show you that in some cases this might be possible the 200 water Ray has been connected for about 5 minutes and no issue I'm going to unplug it now and I'm getting everything ready to connect the 800 WTS to the bigger power station all eight panels are now wired together I had to wire two in series and then four series strings in parallel that required I use some 4:1 Branch connectors as well as mc4 inline fuses and yes these are of course different solar panels so I had to do the math and wire them in such way as to minimize power losses by my calculations I'm going to get around 700 WTS of Max potential power from these 800 WTS of solar panels and because that's so much current I had to size my wires appropriately and I had to swap out my uh solar adapter cable for a thicker one for fun I also added this PV disconnect switch and a wattmeter so let's first check what open circuit voltage we're getting on the wattmeter says around 41 volts VC VOC open circuit voltage cuz this is not yet connected to the power station and before I even decided to over panel this power station I had to do my due diligence so I reached out to ankor and they said yes this uh Power Station the c1000 can indeed be over panel and the output power and current of the solar panels are constrained by what they call the power processing system so that all being said let's go ahead and connect the solar panels I'm just disconnecting the switch first so that I can connect them by turning the switch so I'm going to go ahead and plug in the uh solar uh adapter cable in into the charging port on my power station there it goes but this switches off so it's not yet connected let me just get that situated and now for the moment of truth let's start the solar charging okay there it goes starting to trickle in and look at that it's settling around at only 420 Watts interesting so if we look at the power meter we see that the voltage of the solar array is 33.6 volt and the amperage is 12.58 12.5 is an important figure because that's the current limit of this power station so what the power meter is showing us is that this solar array I've set up here is pretty suboptimal uh for use with that power station because I'm really not taking advantage of the 60 volt limit and because of the way I've wired them it's producing a lot of current but a lot of that is getting clipped by the power station since 12.5 amps is the limit so I've kind of run into another issue of over paneling which is that you have to have a good wiring configuration to take advantage of the solar charging limits of your power station otherwise you could have a lot of clipping like I'm having right now and you could only get 400 watts of output from 800 watts of solar panels so if I wanted to take full advantage of this power station's 600 W solar charging limit then I would have to buy new solar panels that I could string together to form an array that has a higher open circuit voltage still within that 60 volt limit adjusted for temperature but that would require quite a bit of work that I'm frankly not willing to put in my time or money to do so I'm just going to let this array charge my power station for a while and see how much energy we get here comes the shade after 1 hour the solar panels charge the power station from 22% to 37% that's not that much obviously the shade came in pretty quickly after I plugged in the solar panels regardless I think the two examples of over paneling that we looked at in this video demonstrate the potential it has for faster solar charging but also the challenges that come along with it and how you have to do it right in order to take full advantage subscribe for more beginner friendly videos on solar power and I'll see you in the next one ...
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