Hi I'm Amy at the altE Store. I'm taking advantage of this beautiful fall day to show the effect
of shading on your solar panel. And not just any shading, shading on different areas of
your solar panel. It really does make a big difference. So I am actually, I'm outside,
it's 2 in the afternoon in November, so I've got my panels pretty steep because the sun
is fairly low. I do have a meter that is measuring the amount of sunlight that I'm at, and so
it's at the same angle as the sun. So it is showing me that I've got 893 Watt per square meter.
Now Standard Test Conditions is at 1000W/sq meter, so I'm not at ideal sun, but
it's pretty darn good. So this is perfect to show you what this will do. Now, I have
got a single solar panel right here. I've got my negative cable here and my positive
here. Coming just straight out of the back, not going to anything else. I have 2 multimeters,
one's set up for volts, one's set up for amps. What I'm going to do is show you the output
of this completely unshaded. So I have .48 amps, and 19.4 volts. That's a really nice
output for a 5 watt panel. So now what I'm going to show you is what happens when I shade
a certain section of the solar panel. I'm just going to do a little bit across the bottom
row. So you see all of these cells are wired in series, so depending on how I shade it,
I'm going to have different effects. So I've shaded across the whole bottom, and I really
have not affected the voltage at all. It's 19.2 volts. I take the shade away and it's
19.4 volts. Really not much change at all. Now if I switch over to my amp meter, and
do the same, I'm at .48 amps. Now I start shading across the bottom, and I'm going to
just read them off as I go down. So I'm at .48, .47, .46, .45, .38, .32, .25. I'm now
down about half of my power is gone. .26, .21 if I shade that bottom. So remember volts
times amps equals watts, so even though my volts didn't drop at all, with my amps dropping
down, I've practically knocked out this whole solar panel. Now let's do the same going up
the string. Going back to my volts, I'm at 19.3, I'm just going to go up and shade a
bunch of the same row. So same effect, really not much impact to shading the row going up.
But if I look at the current, I'm going down a bit, but, not as dramatically as the last
time. Woop, let me get that last one there. There we go. If I shade half of it, I'm down
to .33 from .48. So because of the way the they are wired, I'm not affecting the output
as badly. It's still not great, but it's not as bad as when I was shading going across.
One more look, let's look just going right across the middle. So I'm pretty much shutting
the whole thing off. Look at that, one row going across, I'm down to .13 amps, from .43.
Going back to my volt meter, and do the same. 19 volts, 18.8, it doesn't really care voltage
wise, but it cares a lot current wise. So keep that in mind, you need to worry about
not only how much shading is going on, but where the shading is. So again, I'm going
to knock out a whole quarter of the panel, 18.8V. .15 amps. So, it's not linear. Don't
think, oh, I'm only shading a tiny little bit, it's not going to affect it at all. It
really will affect it. So, sun, put your panels in the sun. I'm Amy at the altE Store. I hope
you found this helpful. If you did, please like it and share. And put in the comments
what other videos you'd like us to demonstrate, and I'll be happy to go do that. Also check
out our website at altEstore.com, where we're making renewable doable.