Can Harbor Freight 100W Solar Panels Be Wired in Series? | Thunderbolt Solar
Hey welcome back to the channel today We're going to answer a question that I Have been looking for Can you do the Harbor Freight Thunderbolt solar panels 100 watts can We do them in series to increase the Voltage We're going to answer that question Right now [Applause] First thing you have to do is put mc4 Connectors on the end of the wires and You know cut off the one that came with It this will allow you to daisy chain These and become series Generally all the stuff that Harbor Freight does is it makes it into Parallel so you can keep the 18 volts That puts out and just continually raise The amps but we need six panels per of Per solar array here we have two solar Rays so we're going to make three panels Which should give us somewhere along the Line of 300 watts of 75-ish boat output All right so let's we're going to test These and see the output right now I'm On Volts They're setting direct sunlight it's Really good sunlight We're holding about 20 volts right here I'm going to go ahead and say these are Open open circuit we're going to call These 25 But right now in direct sunlight we're
Getting 20 votes on this one and we're Going to try this on each set I think That's important to get a gauging of how Each one works I'm using my kuwaits uh 601 multimeter This thing is awesome it's about the Size of a cell phone it's not overly Expensive if you're doing a lot of this Stuff here I think you should get a Decent multimeter Again uh 19.9 that one's 19.9 as well so That one's pretty much exactly the same And let's do this one here and we'll Even though they are 19 We have to consider open circuit voltage Because we don't want to Shorter system Out this one is 20.07 so it could be just the different Angle or just a little bit different It's inefficiency of the So close it doesn't matter but are the Suns just at a different angle [Music] See here do one more time [Music] 19.89 so 20 volts is the output right Now so we're talking about open circuit When you're talking about open open Circuit voltage you need to think about The perfect scenario that you can damage Your equipment on the cloudy days of the Winter you're not going to get full Voltage out of these you're not going to Get full amps out of these you have to
Make sure that on that perfect sunny day In the middle of the summer when these Panels are Peak Performance that they Don't over voltage your system so the Book says this is 18 volt working 18.5 Volt working output but we want to talk About open voltage the open voltage is The very very Peak voltage that it could Be and there's very little literature on This so we're going to go a little bit Over right now we're clocking uh 20 Volts at this angle which is almost Perfect sun for these we're going to go Ahead and call them 25 volts open Circuit voltage so each one of these This will be 75 volts we'll count this As uh Yes 75 volts yeah man hey I got weekly County math what can I say 75 volts at The peak output All right what we're doing now is we're Again we're just going to test this Sun's a little different 19.74 volts and this is the other panel Again testing it 19.84 so what we're going to do is take The Of this panel we're going to take the Female and then we're going to take the Positive and click together Now we're going to have the positive of This panel and the negative of this Panel and we're going to check our Voltage we should be close to 40 volts
[Music] 39.59 so this absolutely will run in Series I don't think we need to go more Than uh three panels because our system That we're going to be testing this is Our Learning System it's an all-in-one System that we're putting together and It has a maximum uh working open voltage Input of 85 volts so with these three Panels being 75 or you know 75 total 25 Each I think we're going to be really Safe now let's go ahead and see if we Can run three Again on this one what we're going to do Is we're going to take the female of This panel And this is called series you're going To take the female of female of this Panel put into the metal this panel Female this panel put in the middle of That panel and then what it does is it Multiplies the voltage or increases the Voltage adds the voltage basically what It does All right nothing blew up that's a good Sign It's always a good sign male of this one Now we're using the female of that one And this one is in the middle in series I've worked with this stuff you know I've worked with voltage and a lot Throughout my career it's a lot easier To Do it than it is to explain it
Perfect 59.45 .49 DC votes I got my I'll set this on auto all right one more Time we've got the Positive wire of the first panel and the Negative wire of the second panel and That is in series which is 25 25 and 25 And reality is right now we're putting Out about 20 20 so we should get close To 60 volts I've got my multimeter set On automatic Again we try it more times and we are at 59.72 volts that's about as close as We're going to get considering each one Of the panels where uh each one of the Panels were doing 20 you know 19 19.9 Volts so yeah that's pretty dagged I'm Accurate pretty good so the way our System will be set up so if you're Interested in this follow us on our Build we're going to be putting a video Out on the complete solar build we will Have four sets of three so we have Series and parallel put together to have Maximum wattage for our system which Will take in eventually the one system Will take in 1400 watts and I think this Is going to be a perfect match and I Hope this answered the question with Harbor Freight panels yes you can run Them in series [Music] [Applause]
[Music] Thank you
