Roll Up Solar Panels / Ogre MPPT Controller

BFL13 wrote:
am shocked, just shocked, that you haven't been reading all these solar threads over the last few years!

The advertised 20-30% gains with MPPT vs PWM are taken very early and late in the day, not at the mid-day hours of most solar intake, when the MPPT is more like 10% better. IE, 1 amp more than 2 amps is 50% gain. but 1 amp more than 10 amps is 10% gain.

Hmmmm ... what parts of this article are Smoke-N-Mirrors?:

http://www.wholesalesolar.com/Windy/MPPT-article.html

I'm not so concerned with what is good enough. I'm more interested in what the optimum is - for maybe only a few dollars more. Solar is inefficient enough without making it worse trying to save a few bucks, IMHO. Remember that with portable panels, if you want you can walk up to them and tweak them towards the sun from sunrise to sunset way better than can be done with roof mounted ones. I think that harvesting max energy from early morning to sunset as best you can requires a MPPT controller - from what I've learned.

I also may consider using panels that come with this technology to further squeeze a bit more efficiency out of them under all conditions:

http://www.gogreensolar.com/products/solarmagic-power-optimizer

Here's a bit more on it from the my old employer - who introduced it a few years ago:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/A-Change-in-Solar-Magic-Product-Strategy-at-National