Mottled shade on solar panels not good?
I may have misunderstood, but I read something while on a trip (I can’t remember where I read it) that left me with the impression that it was damaging to the diodes on my panels to leave them operati...
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With no shading, I had my three 100w panels in parallel with MPPT and also tried with them in series with the MPPT. Made absolutely no difference to amps to the battery in full sun.
With shade coming in where the shadow from the trailer (ground mounted solar) started across the array from one end late in the day, I started to lose amps to the battery.
I chose to be in parallel for that, since I kept more amps coming in from the remaining part of the array, whereas being in series meant losing more sooner. The shadow was at an angle somewhat moving across, so it might have been a race between what diodes could do for you and what keeping unaffected panels going does for you. You still have diodes in an affected panel even when in parallel of course.
Perhaps it is another of those things that "depends".
With shade coming in where the shadow from the trailer (ground mounted solar) started across the array from one end late in the day, I started to lose amps to the battery.
I chose to be in parallel for that, since I kept more amps coming in from the remaining part of the array, whereas being in series meant losing more sooner. The shadow was at an angle somewhat moving across, so it might have been a race between what diodes could do for you and what keeping unaffected panels going does for you. You still have diodes in an affected panel even when in parallel of course.
Perhaps it is another of those things that "depends".
