Harbor Freight 100 Watt Solar Kit
Looking for input on Harbor Freights 100 watt solar kit. A question I have is each kit comes with a controller if you put two kits together could you get by with one controller?
Forum Discussion
Sam Spade wrote:
Get a look at the "manual" that comes with the kit.
Some panels and controllers are made to be "chained" with a single controller and some are not.
Note: Since there are some losses involved, a 100 watt panel likely will produce only about .7 amps at 12 volts. Barely enough to float a fully charged large battery.
Two together will get you about 1.5 amps IN FULL SUN, which still really isn't much.
You're math is way off. Likely by a decimal place. A 100 watt panel likely has a Imp of around 5 or 6 amps.
OP, what's this kit cost? HF is know for selling over priced junk. Large solar panels sell for around 50 cents a watt. Smaller ones like you're looking at are usually about $1 a watt. If this panel is much over $100 it's too much. What kind of controller? I'll guess a small PWM model with no adjustable set points and not monitoring or display. You can buy one of those for $40 ish from a good manufacturer like Morningstar.
If the panel is rated Imp 6 amps and the controller is rated for at least 20 amps it should handle 2 panels. Anything less than 20 amps and you may be wasting power or burning out the controller on a clear cold day when panels put out more current.
