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Benchmark 2- NewPowa 100W 12vdc RV solar panels.

Mattb4

Solar Wizard
Joined
Jul 15, 2022
Messages
3,716
Location
NW AR
Benchmark 2- NewPowa 100W 12vdc RV solar panels.

A couple months back I picked up 2 -100 watt Mono solar panels from NewPowa off of Ebay. I was not paying much attention to any differences between my old Poly panels and these news Mono ones until they arrived and I got ready to install them. Not only are they smaller in size but the new panels Voc and Vmp are a different voltage. Worse than that they were a lower voltage than my old ones. If I ran them with my old array I would drag down the efficiency of all. True I would still gain some watts but not as much as if kept them separate.

So instead I have the 2 connected in series running to a Makeskyblue 30a SCC (V118) that charges a 24vDC 100ah battery setup that I plan to use for powering my computer devices. But I wanted to see how they perform. So...

On Aug 3rd (yesterday) I ran a benchmark test to see how well these panels would perform. My test setup used a 400w 120vac small resistance heater as load, powered by the inverter/battery. My methodology was to start taking watt readings when panels were free of any shade. Every hour I would run the heater and catch the watts delivered reading from the SCC. This way I could get the best possible reading based on time of day and eliminate any issues with temporary shading from clouds. The temperature started at 86F at 10 am. and peaked at 98F about 3:30 pm. So some loss from the heat was expected.

My results are as follows:

10 am: 100 watts
11 am: 120 watts
12 am: 145 watts
1 pm: 155 watts
-→1:30 pm: 162 watts peak was observed at about this time.
2 pm: 155watt
3 pm: 145 watts
4 pm: 125 watts
5 pm: 95 watts

Earlier and later watts due to my wooded location could be said to only add up the starting ~100 watts so using the 8 hours of results I end up with 1040 watt-hours calculated with an average of 130w/hr. Better than I expected on these panels.

20220804123302.jpg You can see the watt production describes a pretty standard curve in relation to sun rise and fall.
 
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