EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SOLAR PANELS

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the different choices of solar panels and components on the market, and before deciding on your solar setup, it’s always recommended to do your research completely. Below we have gathered all the information you needto understand how a solar panel works and which type of solar panel will best suit your needs.

Solar power doesn’t require fuel, which makes it clean and quiet, and with the years of technology improvement, it’s also relatively inexpensive. These reasons alone contribute to the benefits of have a solar system, not to mention they’re easy to use and reliable.

The most commonly used solar panels for camping and off-grid travels

While set up at camp or stationed on the road, with the right solar setup, you can charge your auxiliary battery and lighten the load on your alternator, saving fuel, and ultimately, saving you money.

There are couple of options:

Glass-covered panels with alloy frames are common because they offer a good combination of strength and durability.

Semi-flexible panels are rapidly gaining popularity and have a much lower profile. They’re also lighter in weight and can be shaped to fit a curved surface making it a versatile option.

Portable panels offer the benefit of being compact with the ability to transport them anywhere. These are best suited for off-road/off-grid travels, camping, and can be easily packed up for any outing.

The most commonly types of portable panels are folding solar panels and solar blankets. Folding solar panels are more cost effective and offer more power for their size, and most will come withfolding legs which allow you to angle the panel straight towards the sun and obtain higher efficiency. A blanket solar panel is much more portable, lightweight, and easier to transport and store.

To perform at its highest and most effective state, solar panels must be pointed directly towards the sun and kept relatively cool.Whether you opt for a permanent or portable solar panel setup,it’s important to remember these two requirements.

How solar panels work

The easiest way is to think of a solar panel as two layers of silicon sandwiched together with different materials added to each layer. In our case, the top layer has an excess of electrons, and the bottom layer has an excess of holes or free space, making those electrons travel through the cell to get to the holes when sunlight hits the solar cell. These light particles are known as photons, kick the electrons out of those holes, to the top layer where instead of going back to the holes, they travel along thin wires known as fingers and thicker wires known as bus bars. From there, they pass through your battery providing charges and then travel back to the base layer and is repeated in a cycle.

Each of the solar cells contain very low voltage and low current requiring many of them to be wired together to provide usable output to charge your batteries.

Types of solar panels

Most consumer grade solar panels on the market will either be monocrystalline, polycrystalline or amorphous silicon.

Amorphous thin film solar panels are slightly better in low light and cloudy conditions. They are built thinner and more flexible, but they come at a massive cost. They are much more expensive to produce and are less efficient. Generally, you will need twice the surface area of a monocrystalline or polycrystalline panel to get the same energy output. The highest grade of amorphous solar cells are about 10 percent efficient.

Polycrystalline solar panels are the cheapest to produce which means they are the cheapest type of solar panels on the market. Polycrystalline solar panels are more efficient than amorphous panels, however, because they’re composed by pouring molten silicon into a mold and then allowing it to cool, you will sometimes see fractures and cracks, leading to a less efficient solar panel. Polycrystalline solar panels have an overall efficiency of over 22 percent.

Monocrystalline solar panels are the most efficient type of solar panels on the market due to their size and performance. These panels are better than polycrystalline solar panels in heating and low-light conditions, but they cost more to produce which is because they are made from a single piece of silicon that eliminates cracking and fractures. Monocrystalline solar panels have an efficient rating of about 26.5 percent overall.

What else matters when choosing solar panels

Apart from types of solar panels, another thing to look into when choosing solar panels is the amount of bus bars a panel contains.Think of the fingers as the back roads and the bus bars as the highways. Having more bus bars increases the chances of a higher efficiency rating, and better durability and longevity. Current solar panels tend to contain around four or five bus bars. If you have an older system and notice your setup seems to be underperforming, it might be a good idea to look into upgrading your solar panel system.

Lastly, when shopping around for solar panels, keep an eye on the grade of the glass that the solar cells are made up of. Grade A orClass A means that there’s no visible defects; Grade B or Class B cells show minor defects, scratches, and yellowing color; Grade C or Class C cells show visible defects including chips, cracks, missing sections of bus bars and electrical data that doesn’t meet specifications; and Grade D or Class D cells are panels with major defects, breakages or damages.

Manufacture details

Manufacturers and retailers use similar standardized testing conditions in the lab to rate their solar panel wattage. They light up the panel with a thousand watts per square meter of light and then set the ambient temperature up to 25 degrees Celsius. From there, they simulate the amount of atmosphere that the light needs to pass through. For every degree that a solar panel reaches above 25 degrees, it could lose around half a percent of efficiency.

Nonetheless, in testing the panels, you can derive the normal operating cell temperature. This is the temperature that your solar panel will reach under normal operating conditions. A typically normal operating cell temperature might be listed as highas 60 degrees Celsius, however, in this case, the lower the number the better, because that means the panel is more efficient at dispelling heat.