Solar at its Best
The Ultimate in Solar ? It probably don't get no better than this, I was camped near this guy most the week, and he built this himself. He is a retired mechanical engineer. This unit is compl...
Forum Discussion
pianotuna wrote:
Yes, there are diodes between all cells. I did do some quickie tests in the summer of 2009 that showed I did not loose the entire panel when one cell was totally shaded. However, Salvo has suggested that partial shading of a single cell is worse than total shading. If I understand what he meant (and often I don't)--the diode fails to "lock out" the cell under those circumstances which results in the panel outputting at the level of the "weakest" cell.
There is something here I don't understand. If all the cells are in series, then one partially blocked cell will result in the whole panel working at the current of the weak cell.
One fully blocked cell will result in losing the whole panel. Or in this case those bypass diodes do their magic trick and you only lose one string, say, 1/4 of the panel if there are 4 bypass diodes? It's interesting that you have diodes on all cells - I thought they usually put just a few diodes.
