Spotted some odd low voltage periods during the night. And i can see the same values in the portal. Has anyone else seen the same effect and is this down to extra bright lunar conditions ? Day 71 was yesterday and i picked another one this week and two others from last year. I haven't seen this happen before.
I see the same. I get 1 or 2 watts if it’s a clear night and a bright moon.
Slither of a moon. Nothing.
I get 1 or 2 watts through most of the night as there is a street lamp opposite, with a bright moon in the right place I can get 4 watts.
If you rub garlic on your solar panels you can increase this wattage, allegedly.
Opposite of vampire draw?
Maxwell across my 4 strings (2 inverters) I’m currently getting 36, 28, 24 and 25V
since I have my power outputs all in kW I can’t see how many watts they’re generating
geoffreycoan I am pulling the data from the get data points api and that states the power is in wattts and voltage and current are decimal to one decimal place. I can’t see any evidence of an associated current with my periods of voltage. I am planning to pull the meter data using that api and see if there are any differences.
Maxwell Doh! Never thought of looking at the GivEnergy data, I was looking in Home Assistant where I’d set all of the power entities to kW, and TBH had disabled the string voltage and current entities because I wasn’t using them.
When I look in the portal, e.g. for last night coming up to midnight, there’s a bit of voltage but no power or current. Presumably because the voltage isn’t above the threshold for lighting the inverter up
We had a bright moon all last night/this morning, so instead of the usual 0v on the strings, we had this:
We get blips of 10V on the top string as car headlights briefly hit part of those panels as cars turn down our road.
If a car stops at the top of the road with headlights on for a few seconds then that can be enough to put 10V on that string for 20-30 minutes. The PV cell has nowhere to discharge to so the voltage takes some time to decay.
We have short strings (5 and 4) so those of you with larger arrays will see longer decay times - which may last all night depending on how much light the PV cell was exposed to.
This is only obvious on HA/GivTCP graphs as the sample period (5 minutes) on the portal means the data there is misleading in this case.
My thoughts were it was moon light related and i wanted to check to see if others were experiencing the same given my previous experience with a faulty mppt channel in the inverter. i don't have any street or car headlight sources that would account this behaviour. I will keep a eye on it.
But the last 4 nights it's been active, presume the periods where there is no solar voltage is down to cloud cover and moon's position. And definately not enough to generate any current.
