What ever happened to..

[littleharbor2]

 The "snow melting" feature that was being touted on the Classic line when they were first marketed? I always thought that was a cool(no pun intended) feature even though I never would have a need for it. I mentioned this on another forum and figured the best place to go with this would be to the fine folks who built the Classic and all other Midnite Solar products.

[boB]

I think I saw your other post ?   Might have been someone else ?

Anyway, yes, we actually did that and were going to add that feature into the Classics.  The killer turned out to be that it did not work in  enough cases and would, in many cases, run your battery dry.

Those cases where it would not work would have been ones where the temperature was too low, like, below 20 degrees F and/or when the snow was too thick.

Also, you are limited to only so much power/amps out of the PV input to melt an array that if larger than a couple of panels, might be WAY too much for a single Classic to handle.

That being said, it does work in some cases.   It is also a lot of fun to do when it works.

Did you see the short animated GIF that I did almost 20 years ago now ?

Here is is again just in case.  This is 2 Kyocera 125 watt, 12V panels using a bench power supply.  I seem to remember it taking about 3 hours to melt the panel on the left.  The right side is a similar panel without any power applied.
This would have worked MUCH better had I not stuck the panel in the snow on the ground and made is just slanted like it would be on a roof.

The outside temperature was around  25 degrees F as I remember as well.   Current has to be below the panel's fuse rating to be legal in a warranty situation.  So this would have been around 10 amps at whatever Voc was at that temperature.  Probably something less than 25 volts.
Let's call it, 250 watts and so that would have been around 750 watt-hours of energy.

boB

[littleharbor2]

boB, Thanks so much for explaining this for us out here. Never saw that GIF before. Cool.