Troubleshooting Solar Panel Connections For Off Grid Tiny House

Since I set up the new solar panels in front of the tiny house they only worked on single day. There was a problem with one of the connectors and with them leaning up against the house I just had no room to work with.

So I moved them away from the tiny house and leaned them up against pallets.

Then I used a volt meter to see if I could find the bad solar panel connectors. The problem is intermittent so it was hard to find. Sometimes I got power and sometimes I did not.

The other problem was that with the meter I could read a voltage on every single panel but once they were connected together I did not get a voltage out of the set.

So it meant that one or more of the connectors were actually damaged.

It was a process of trial and error to finally find the bad solar panel. Actually what I did was connect the solar panels in pairs and check the voltage. When I got good output two times in a row with a pair then I figured this set was good.

I finally had a pair that did not work together so I tried one after another with the third panel until I found the bad panel.

I removed the bad solar panel and swapped it out for another panel.

This time I got 90 volts output. This is good and correct. Success.

I wired them up to the tiny house solar charge controller and I had an instant increase in total solar power output.

Now I have 1,200 watts of solar power connected to my tiny house on wheels.

Follow my daily progress on the path to self sufficiency on my off grid solar homestead.
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