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Hi
today I want to show you flexible solar panel. Now when you think of solar panels
you might be thinking of something like this which is a regular solar panel with
the aluminium frame
it's a little bit heavy and it takes some serious mounting hardware
but that's not what I'm talking about. What i'm talking about is one of these
new flexible solar panels
now this one you can see just rolls out like this and you literally just unroll it
Now the good thing about this, aside from the fact that it's a lot lighter which makes it easier to transport
to mount. It's also flexible so if you have for instance a rounded roof or something like that
you can easily make this work with the roof. Now how you mount this depends on
whether you want it to be a permanent install or semi-permanent if you think you might move it
sometime in the future
a lot of people are just using a silicon
bead along here sticking straight to the roof or wherever they're putting it
now aside from the fact that this one is flexible
and this one is a rigid, what's the difference between these two panels?
well to start with this one is low voltage, this puts out maybe up to 20
volts
whereas this flexible panel here actually put out 320 volts
that's higher than the Voltage inside your house. Now the reason for this high
voltage is that it's meant primarily
grid tie. So rather than storing the power in a battery
you're going to put it straight into the existing grid inside your house
but obviously drop the voltage down using a grid-tie inverter
but that's why the voltage is so high
the good thing about high voltage of course is that you don't need such thick
wires. So if you're going to do a long run between the roof and inside
you don't need to buy some really chunky cables
So thats the advantage of high voltage. Of course it does make it a little more dangerous to
work with
But you're going to put proper mc4 connectors on this pannel anyway, so
there's not really much danger as long as you
use a little bit of common sense and you don't try and touch both
points at the same time, or something crazy like that.
Now you might notice that there's actually no connectors on
here, so you might be thinking how do you connect this? Because on this panel
you have a junction box on the back and then you have your positive and negative
cable coming off, so nice and simple.
If you're wondering this is a 50 watt panel from CDRKING
I'm still very happy with CDRKing solar panels so I do still recommend them.
Their prices seems to be increasing a bit, I think they've realized that there
is a high demand for this solar panels
and you know they're changing models and then increasing the prices
but essentially
seems to be pretty much the same panels as before, so
you know, I think they're really starting to cash in on
the fact that their solar panels were a lot cheaper than everyone elses.
So, how do you put the connectors on here? Well each end
is a wire, you'll see that there's a bit of tape here and If
I peel back the tape, you'll see the wires exposed.
So one end is negative, one end is positive. And what you have to do is solder your connectors onto here
and then you can either put junction box like you see on the back of there
onto here, or you can just use some kind of silicon or something like that
make a good seal with your connection.
I'll pause the video and go and grab one I've already made.
QC policemen are over there
QCs finest
so here's one that I prepared earlier. If you look underneath you'll see where
the wire comes in and I joined on my cable
This is regular 4mm solar cable which is suitable for outdoor use
and then I put an MC4 connector on the end. These are really great connectors, they're
a little bit pricey.
They're not too bad but compared to just home made connections, these are a
little bit more pricey.
Maybe 150 peso per pair
The good thing about these is that you crimp your connector on the inside
and then you put this enclosure over it and it makes a really good water
tight seal. Basically you have a male and a female
when you join together you've got a really good outside suitable connection.
Now what you'll see is that I've put some black silicon here.
It's the same silicon you'd use on your windscreen, if you
you replace the windscreen for example, that's the silicon you're going to put there.
So on each end, I've put one of these connectors.
what you'll do is basically daisy chain these where each panel
will connect to the next and the next one and you're probably going to want to do it in
parallel
since these panels are such high voltage, if you were to put it in series you would
end up with maybe a 1000 or higher
volts. And that's not very workable unless you've got a really high end inverter.
So lets go ahead and test one of these shall we?
So Quezon City Policemen are over there. Manilas Finest.
I always see them
here by the monument, especially at night time when you get some drag racers
coming around this area. So see I just made that connection there, this would
usually go to the next solar panel
But in this case I'm just going to connect directly to this to measure the voltage
and of course the amps
Now it's not an especially sunny day. But that doesn't matter because I already know
that these panels do output what they're meant to. So this is really just to show you
the panel in action.
I'm not even going to expand the panel to its full length because I want to
keep it within the camera shot.
So I'll just open it up a little bit.
Let's get our multimeter and let's start by measuring the voltage.
Now it might be a little bit lower since I've folded over half of the panel. But
let's just check anyway.
So I'm measuring, I don't know if you'll be able to see this from there. But I'm measuring
317 volts, that's pretty high, it's not something that you'd really want to touch
with your bare hands.
Now lets measure the amps. Of course this is going to be much lower than what it
should be, because
you know it's cloudy day and half of the panel is still folded up
like this.
I'm measuring
0.1 amps. So if you do 0.1
multiplied by 320. I'm not sure what the answer is, I'll add that in afterwards.
You might be wondering, what's the point of a flexible solar panel? Why not just stick with the
regular solid panels?
These are especially suitable when you want to mount them somewhere
that's unusual, for instance if you had a bus shelter roof which is like this,
Then you could actually curve this whole panel to fit
perfectly on there. It's also really easy to mount.
Because you could just put a couple of beads of
silicon around the edges and then stick it straight onto a metal roof.
It's super easy to mount, you could mount these in
half a day, 4 or 5 panels in just a few hours.
So that's one of the benefits of these panels.
They're also very light weight if you need to transport them somewhere. That makes them very useful if you're a hardcore philippine traveler
or you're using them for a charity or disaster events.
You can just put these in the car, you don't need to load up a van with heavy solar panels
and worry about the glass breaking. you can just throw these in the back of a car
take them to the site. Hook it all up and you're ready to roll.
You don't even need to mount these permanently. You could just lay them on the ground
put some rocks on the and or something like that and boom you've got instant power ready.
I hope you enjoyed the video. If you have any questions please
leave them in the comments section below. I apologize if the sound quality on this
video isn't very good I'm using this: clip-on mic but I broke the clip so it's
it's falling off all the time
I'm hoping that once I go to edit this, it's all okay.
But I'm a little bit worried. So if you have any questions or perhaps you have an
idea about what you'd use this
flexible solar panel for, leave it in the comments section
and please do remember to give a thumbs up and subscribe. Thanks for watching!