Low on light

When building an expedition vehicle, the success depends of knowledge.
There must be an enormous amount of technical know-how available in the field of mechanical and electrical engineering.

Gaps in the knowledge show later through malfunctioning or breaking down.

It is impossible to custom build an expedition vehicle and know everything.
Even companies specialised in building expedition vehicles in series, although with a low output, upgrade their models every year because they find out that with new experiences and knowledge things were wrong or not optimal and could be better.

The Fuso Szulc is no exception to the above observations and remarks.
Over the last year many things were working perfectly.
And some things needed to be changed.

Currently an issue are the solar panels.
There are six of them on the roof of the Fuso Szulc supposedly having a combined output of 550-watts/35 amps.
There are also 6 Trojan 6 volt batteries.




There is a suspicion this solar system of the Fuso Szulc is not working optimally.
The output rarely gets higher than 25 amps, even in Summer time.

One thing that has been learned over the last couple of weeks is that simply putting 6 solar panels of different sizes and brands is not the way to go.
At the time, together with Santek Trailers, the roof space available for solar panels was carefully measured.
Next, on Internet, sizes of solar panels were found.
Like a puzzle, solar panels were chosen and ordered that would fit the best in the available space.
As a result there are 4 x110 watts solar panels of one brand and two smaller ones of two different brands.
Hence, there are 3 different kinds of solar panels on the roof of the Fuso Szulc.
It seems now that this is not good.
Somehow each manufacturer makes panels with different electric standards and those do not work well with panels of other manufacturers and their standards.

A test has been made with the solar panels of the Fuso Szulc.
On a bright sunny day at 11.35 am and within 15 minutes all solar panels were covered by blankets.
Except one panel.
Next, on the solar monitor inside the Fuso Szulc, the produced amps were read and noted.

It resulted in some remarkable discoveries.

One was that the 4 identical 110 watts solar panels had different readings.
2.8 amp – 3.8 amp – 3.6 amp – 3.8 amp

Another was that a 60 watts solar panel produced a meagre 0.2 amps

Obviously, the solar energy produced by the Fuso Szulc is not as high as it should be.
The challenge now is to find the solutions.




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