How To Test Your Solar Panel - Quick And Easy

[Music] hi everybody my name is Jim with full moon adventure club and today I'm gonna be showing you how to test your solar panels to make sure that they're operating correctly we're gonna be checking the vo C which is gonna be your open circuit voltage and that's the volts coming out in direct Sun then we're also gonna be checking your operating current which is iymp and that's going to be the amps that your solar panels supposed to be putting out in direct Sun this is a very simple process you only need three things to do this you need your solar panel a multimeter that's capable of reading voltage amps and also some Sun the more direct the better so right in the middle of the day is the best time to do this test so this is a very simple video I'm gonna go over this real quick and it's real easy to figure this out so let's jump out there and give it a test okay so the first thing we're gonna want to do is just make sure that your solar panel is nice and clean completely free of dust and debris next on the back here you're gonna look for a little sticker and that's going to have all of your important information on how to test including your open circuit voltage vo C which is going to have your volts twenty one point six is what we have right here and so that's what we're going to test first is the voltage so make sure you locate your vo C or open circuit voltage and take note of that number write it down or whatever just make sure you remember that the second important number is going to be the operating current iymp which is going to be the amps that the solar panel is putting out and direct Sun we have five point eight one amps we'll check that second on your multimeter we're gonna go ahead and make sure it's configured for voltage and the noin has an automatic voltage setting but you're gonna want to say yours too anything above the voltage that was on the back of the panel so we had 21 volts make sure it's set to something above 21 volts so 100 whatever you got to do next we're gonna go ahead and connect to my multimeter it had a little plug here so I just kind of had to put them in there until they were touching both the positive and negative connections maybe you'll have wires that you can use clips whatever you have to do to make sure that your multimeter is connected to that connection and now you can see on my voltmeter set 4 volts we are at 21 volts even since our V OC is supposed to be twenty one point six we know it's working perfectly 21 21 is very close now we're going to move that red terminal over to check amps we're gonna move to the amp side then you're gonna set it to anything above 5 amps mine is set to 10 amps so that's gonna work just fine now we're gonna hook it back up again you can see we're getting 5.0 9 amps and we're supposed to be getting in full Sun 5.8 1 amps so we're really close on that - is kind of a hazy day so that's gonna be more than close enough and now we know our solar panel is working correctly alright so there you go that's a pretty simple test to figure out whether or not you have a working solar panel and once you've figured that out you can move on to either installing it or if you're troubleshooting a problem you'd know that your panel is producing the right amount of power based off of those two measurements you're gonna be good to go if you need a voltmeter I'll put a link in the description below to the one that I used it's been working fine for me and it's very affordable so I'll put a link to that just in case you want to pick one up they're super handy to have for just about anything and also in the description below I will try and ride all this stuff out in case you didn't understand the way I said it I said it too fast it will be written down below below that link for the multimeter in case you need to pick one up that about wraps it up pretty simple test my name is Jim with full moon adventure club and if you have any questions or comments please write them down below and I will try and answer those for you please like share subscribe and all that stuff's really gonna help me out so until the next video thank you so much for watching and happy camping

Channel: fullmoonadventureclub

Views: 211,522

Keywords: fullmoonadventureclub adventure travel Jim rvfourseasons full moon adventure club, how to rv, rv tips and tricks, how to test a solar panel, test a 12 volt solar panel, solar panel test equipment, solar panel not working, fix solar panel, solar panel trouble shooting, measuring solar panel amps, measuring solar panel volts, solar fix, test solar panel with multimeter, how to measure power output of solar panel, solar battery charging problems

Id: 9SxfCSOnns8

Length: 4min 9sec (249 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 16 2018