Vlog 57: Sunny Side Up
I’ve been sent an 80 Watt semi-flexible solar panel to review by a company called Lensun (www.lensunsolar.com); note that this is not an advert, they’ve not paid me to say nice things and they have no editorial control over this video. It’s just genuinely my thoughts on the panel as I found it (until the point where I broke it, for more on which, watch the video).
Items mentioned in this video
80W panel: https://geni.us/CtC_Lensun80W
100W panel: https://geni.us/CtC_Lensun100W
Hello, watched with interest most of your vlogs on the narrow boat, only ever had a short holiday on one, so nice to see the RIGHT way to do things as proved by your experiences. Now to the solar thing, I only just got into such things myself, but probably being a little more electrically orientated that yourself, I found your descriptions worthy of note, only the bit about covering any cell on the panel causing a complete loss of output didn’t ring true, the reason of course is that all the cells are in series to make the 21 odd Volts, and any one cell that is NOT generating will present a high resistance to the chain, hence no Amps. The serious panels overcome this by building in bypass diodes on the cells so that blocking one cell causes it to revert to a subtraction of 0.6V from the chain instead of the usual 21/36th of a Volt addition . the 0.6V being the voltage across a conducting diode.
That does look impressive, and good review! one question is can you walk on it if you glued it onto the boat roof? if you can that would be great I would imagine as its something you cant do with the standard ones….
rob
Yes, you can walk on it to a degree – no stilettos or similar – and it should be fine. No, best not tried with the standard panels!
that is good… would be good to see these incorporated into new shells..:)
Well, yes and no because not everyone wants the flexible type. They aren’t as efficient as traditional ones, get very hot since they’re bonded to the boat (and solar cells don’t like being too hot) and they’re really glued to the paint rather than the metal. Hard to remove too. An option, maybe!