question

Shade is really detrimental to a solar panels output. You are better off having cloud cover, than shade...

You have looked at your sites solar harvesting potential, unshaded (the pdf review) and you can live on about 1kWh a day? That is enough for a fridge, a couple of led lights, and a phone charger??

I am mobile, and every site I stay at I use my phone and a sun position app to gain insight as to how much sun a site has potential for. Clouds permitting.

Some insights on how much energy you are expecting to use would be useful.

I just updated the PVGIS report and would have on average 1.580 KWh per day in December. 1440W installation : 4 panels BlueSolar SPM043602400 Solar Panel 360W-24V Mono (seems like a good idea for shade).

By the way, I won't need a fridge (there is fresh beer at the pub) and this is a 4 year "temporary" situation ;). The house won't be moving.

About technical details :

* Should I connect those 4 panels in parallel to optimise in the mentioned shady environment ?

* Should I add panel optimisers ?

* Is there anything else I can do (apart from cutting some branches, moving the house, having the panels 200m away or oversizing the system :p ) ?

Cheers,

Olivier

Hi everyone, just giving an update on how this all turned out :). I had to connect the four panels in series (otherwise the voltage was too low for the MPPT). It becomes hard in winter (from the 15th of November) : the sun is low so I get a lot of shade from the trees (I'm only producing after 12.30) and the weather is usually cloudy. I have a feeling it's sunnier in the morning (that's where the trees are ...). Right now, in practical terms, I only switch the inverter when required (2-4 hours a day, it uses 20W per hour when no load) and my computer is by far the most gluttonous. I added some graphs to show how the system is behaving over winter at the end ;).

Some stuff I still wonder if I need to do something about :

• My battery will never get a good charge for 3 months in winter
• My SOC is sometimes funny
• The voltage seems lower in winter (BMS cell voltage and battery voltage) for an equivalent state of charge in good season
• Any power under 40W does not seem to reach the battery

Past 90 days

From yesterday (an unusual very sunny day for the entire day !!)

To get any meaningful power in the depths of winter, you need to way oversize panels, then in summer you'll have way too much.

PVWatts calculator below

Yearly production

all calculated figures are average and some days you may get virtually nothing of use

For example here is screenshot from a string on my system with 2 conservative days kWh kWh visable- south facing/ 33deg pitch/virtually zero shading/ rated at 1660w, vast difference between the days