Gentlemen:
I have an off-grid small solar system to keep my 12 volt airplane battery charged. The panel is supposedly a 20 watt, but the best I've ever seen it do is about .5 Amp x 14 volts or about 7 watts, which is good enough. Typical 36 solar cell panel, about 14" x 21". I am going to add a couple other batteries and a microcontroller switcher to keep all topped off, but it's not done yet.
My only concern is something mentioned by a friend who plays around with electronics who said that it's best to leave the cells connected to some non-zero load while in the sun, even to the point of shorting them out or running them thru a 5 ohm resistor, etc. This is because the cells supposedly degrade unless they have some current running thru them.
At this point, when my plane battery reaches 14 volts or so, I have just been disconnecting it from the battery, and putting a 5 ohm resistor across the output of the panels. I have a small Coleman solar charge controller which will do this automatically, but without connecting the resistor to it, and the controller's not connected yet anyway.
Is this story about keeping some load on the cells true? Anybody else heard this claim, or should I just let the panel voltage float when all batteries in my system are in full charge range?
Thanks in advance...
I have an off-grid small solar system to keep my 12 volt airplane battery charged. The panel is supposedly a 20 watt, but the best I've ever seen it do is about .5 Amp x 14 volts or about 7 watts, which is good enough. Typical 36 solar cell panel, about 14" x 21". I am going to add a couple other batteries and a microcontroller switcher to keep all topped off, but it's not done yet.
My only concern is something mentioned by a friend who plays around with electronics who said that it's best to leave the cells connected to some non-zero load while in the sun, even to the point of shorting them out or running them thru a 5 ohm resistor, etc. This is because the cells supposedly degrade unless they have some current running thru them.
At this point, when my plane battery reaches 14 volts or so, I have just been disconnecting it from the battery, and putting a 5 ohm resistor across the output of the panels. I have a small Coleman solar charge controller which will do this automatically, but without connecting the resistor to it, and the controller's not connected yet anyway.
Is this story about keeping some load on the cells true? Anybody else heard this claim, or should I just let the panel voltage float when all batteries in my system are in full charge range?
Thanks in advance...
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