This weekend was the last one I would have some free time for the next two, so we climbed on the roof with garden hose in hand, and wet down the solar panel.
Long story short. It made a good difference, but not enough to know for sure.
Ok, so here is the data.
I had a brain fart (that’s the short version, the long version is that I went to watch “Pawn Sacrifice” (a movie about the 1972 world chess championships) with Terry, it’s a very limited release movie and so it was a two hour round trip to get to a theater where it was showing, so I lost a ton of time there… Then when I went to turn on the back garden tap, the tap leaked. Its always been leaking but this time it was much worse, so I fixed it, and that involved a trip to the hardware store to get another tap….) and forgot to put the temperature on a 15 minute trend, so here is the 48 hour trend;
As you can see we dropped it from 65C to 45C, so a pretty big drop, but it flat-lined at 45. I could not get it any lower… short of driving to the shop and getting a few bags of ice… And even then, I worry that the ice would need to be fully washed off before taking a reading.
If you recall from the blog a few days back, I needed to get 25C to take the reading….. Yeah… nahhhh… Did not get that cold.
Not only, but also, I needed 800wm2…. yeah…nahhhh, because of the movie/tap delay, I missed peak radiation…. I did the test at around 670wm2….
Ok, all that said. Here is the power graph;
Better. Much better, but not double like I was looking for, but, given the still higher temps and the lack of watts per meter squared, there is hope.
Will re-run the test in a few weeks, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Long story short, the test chamber that the panels get rated in…… Refrigerated sunlight. Not happy. Not exactly real world.
