I hung the 15 Watt PV today... Like its brother, it is on the side of the deck with almost no elevation angle. I also hung a 1.5 Watt solar maintainer that I am using with the solar hot water controller. It is also mounted on the south side with no elevation angle because I don't want it looking at the sky. I want it to be responsive to general illumination not incident light. I may have to put a diffuser over it if it is doesn't do what I expect.
Yesterday I put the battery on the 500 mA charger to bring it up to full charge. After almost 24 hours it was effectively at full charge but the charger had not changed over to its float mode because it just hadn't reached the crossover voltage.
After I installed the 15 Watt PV and connected it in parallel with the 5 Watt PV which was already connected to the charge controller, I ran the radio on receive from about 1PM until I went on the air at 4 PM. At that time the battery was still at full charge even though the receiver was drawing .78 amp. I ran JT65 for 1 hour from 4 to 6 PM and PSK for an hour after 7 PM. The battery voltage under load dropped to 12.3 volts but recovered to 12.8 when the radio was turned off. It is quite evident that solar system will recharge the battery on a bright winter day. We will see it it can handle a cloudy day.
The next solar project (other than the PIC project) is to add a controlled float charger/maintainer switched into the solar controller primary to handle those cloudless days. It sounds like another PIC project.
