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!