TL:DR: I saw a set of cheap panels with weird specs at Home Depot. I bought some to experiment on and to use as portables to augment my mounted solar.
Home Depot is selling 200w of panel for $114. That’s $0.57/Watt. Not amazing compared to used panels (typically $0.33/Watt) but HD is all over the place and has free ship-to-store.
It also comes with mounting brackets and one of those single-stage PWM controllers. I’m not bagging on that kind of controller, but it’s not a great fit for this particular set of panels.
#THE CATCH
The panels are a weird design, apparently 24 cells in series. Normal “12v nominal” panels have 36 in series for ~18Vmp. These have a Vmp of 12.0v, so I think we would call them “8v nominal”.
This makes them practically unusable in parallel for charging lead or LiFePO4.
You could run the panels in series on the PWM controller since it has a 50v input max and the series Voc would be 30v. But, due to the way PWM works the panels would be running at in the 14v range at the most. This is way, way off the 24.0Vmp of the series array. I’d expect a max harvest of ~120w with that kind of setup. If these were normal panels in parallel and on PWM I’d expect a max of ~160w. We can go into the math on that if anyone wants.
The best case scenario IMO would be to run the panels in series with an MPPT controller. This would get us closer to ~170w max harvest.
some other thoughts:
- The panels might work well enough in parallel for 3S Li-NMC because of that chemistry’s lower voltage
- HD has a 10% discount program for veterans if you provide them with a bit of documentation.
There are an online calculators like this one from NOAA. This fork adds the ability to update the time with a click rather than manually. There are others but I haven’t played with them much.
Since I travel constantly I’ve been on casual lookout for an app that does the calcs for us based on local time / position but I haven’t seen any. Several apps show the solar zenith angle and we can take the COS of that manually with a calculator with trig functions. The standard android calculator app will do it.
Yeah, it’s an imperfect tool for our purposes but better than nothing. Combining it with data from a solar irradiance meter would be great but right now I can’t justify ~$100 to devote to the cause. :-)