BFL13 wrote:
I don't understand worrying about electrical efficiency if that didn't get you more amps per dollar as the true measure of efficiency.
There's really no one true measure of efficiency. You are usually optimizing one thing per the other. Cost efficiency is a good measure. Lots of people like energy per unit area as the true measure of efficiency for solar panels.
Efficiency is often defined as a ratio of input to output. But really it comes down to measuring what is important to you, and different people have different priorities.
For me I am most interested in maximizing the power I can get from my solar panels into the actual devices consuming it, end to end. Charging batteries is not my objective, just a necessary step for the part of my usage that I choose to time phase away from when the sun is shining. Any usage I can get right out of the panels and skip the batteries has massive efficiency gains when the panels are trying to charge almost full batteries, or just wasting solar output between PWM pulses.
Jim
