What did you do to your Volvo today? Topic is solved

[abscate]

Pin 16 and 5 on Volvos

You don’t want to be putting any loads or grounds on the canbus or K lines on the OBD

[Volvebaker]

Put new tweeters in the front dash! I found my stock ones, as often happens, magnets had come unglued and fallen off who knows how long ago. I recovered the passenger one it was magnetized to the airbag, but the drivers is in the dark depths of the dash somewhere...

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[brunocerous]

I changed the distributor cap and rotor, along with the spark plug wires in the T5. There was a fair bit of corrosion and wear on the old set. The wires seemed to be stamped “12/04,” so it was probably time.

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[MrAl]

Pin 16 and 5 on Volvos

You don’t want to be putting any loads or grounds on the canbus or K lines on the OBD

hey there,

Do they give the wire gauges for pin 16 wire and pin 5 and/or wires?

[MrAl]

I changed the distributor cap and rotor, along with the spark plug wires in the T5. There was a fair bit of corrosion and wear on the old set. The wires seemed to be stamped “12/04,” so it was probably time.

835E5986-DDE2-4A44-B5BB-1D63C63C01C7.jpeg
3DCDF472-4CC1-41E8-A3D7-75A0C5011D75.jpeg

That looks almost as bad as mine did. I had to change out mine too just a week or two ago.
I posted a pic of my cap too somewhere on this forum.

[abscate]

Ooof, that’s bad, Bruno. Hard to start, I bet.

[MrAl]

Constantly checking the battery voltage due to some problems in the past and now that i have a solar panel connected i am keeping a very close eye on the battery voltage.
The past few days have been pretty sunny out so the voltage was holding up. It's not great though i can say that much for sure.
Now today will be the first day with a lot of cloud cover so i'll see how well it does with mostly cloudy days. I dont expect it to do too well but we'll see i guess. I also expect that going to a larger panel wont help that much either on cloudy days. That's a shame because if we get two cloudy days in a row it will probably be almost as if i had no panel at all. Maybe in the summer months it will do better though.

[abscate]

Constantly checking the battery voltage due to some problems in the past and now that i have a solar panel connected i am keeping a very close eye on the battery voltage.
The past few days have been pretty sunny out so the voltage was holding up. It's not great though i can say that much for sure.
Now today will be the first day with a lot of cloud cover so i'll see how well it does with mostly cloudy days. I dont expect it to do too well but we'll see i guess. I also expect that going to a larger panel wont help that much either on cloudy days. That's a shame because if we get two cloudy days in a row it will probably be almost as if i had no panel at all. Maybe in the summer months it will do better though.

Most people,overestimate the loss of solar output due to clouds. It’s roughly 20-25% loss, ie, a 400 watt panel will output 300 Watts in clouds. Temperature is another factor so that works in our favour in climate states; higher temperatures kill solar panel efficiency

There is an interesting effect that in wispy light cloud cover, solar output INCREASES . I hang out with smart people so my brain was able to figure this out. Hint. It is a cousin to the reason the sky is blue

[BlackBart]

Interesting - why does high temperature hurt PV performance?

[MrAl]

Constantly checking the battery voltage due to some problems in the past and now that i have a solar panel connected i am keeping a very close eye on the battery voltage.
The past few days have been pretty sunny out so the voltage was holding up. It's not great though i can say that much for sure.
Now today will be the first day with a lot of cloud cover so i'll see how well it does with mostly cloudy days. I dont expect it to do too well but we'll see i guess. I also expect that going to a larger panel wont help that much either on cloudy days. That's a shame because if we get two cloudy days in a row it will probably be almost as if i had no panel at all. Maybe in the summer months it will do better though.

Most people,overestimate the loss of solar output due to clouds. It’s roughly 20-25% loss, ie, a 400 watt panel will output 300 Watts in clouds. Temperature is another factor so that works in our favour in climate states; higher temperatures kill solar panel efficiency

There is an interesting effect that in wispy light cloud cover, solar output INCREASES . I hang out with smart people so my brain was able to figure this out. Hint. It is a cousin to the reason the sky is blue

Hi,

Not sure where you get your data from but i'll be crunching the numbers after a few more days. I think by then i will have enough measurement data to make a good estimate for my area of the country. There's an old saying you probably heard before and i quote:
"One good measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions". (Ha ha). I have my own counter to that though, and that is:
"One good expert specification is worth a thousand measurements". So it can work both ways depending on the familiarity of the subject matter.
For me as it stands right now, there are only a few estimates i can make with nearly absolute accuracy, and that is the general insolation levels in my area. It's unfortunate that we are probably around 50 percent even in direct sunlight, at least for this time of year. During cloud cover it is going to go down, but i dont have enough data yet to estimate that. It's also unfortunate that i believe the solar panel ratings are based on the 1000 watts per square meter maximum insolation level on the planet, so if i did have a 400 watt panel i would be already down to 200 watts at least at this time of year. Even worse, my panel is rated at just 20 watts (ha ha).

At some point i will also add current measurements of the solar panel but i havent gotten to that yet because it means modifying a lot in the system including two microcontroller programs and some added hardware out in the car. It would be nice to have that because then i would have direct measurements of the insolation levels so i could make instantaneous measurements. For now i have to go by the change in voltage level and that takes time.

What kind of conditions cause a solar panel to output more than their rated output power?
Also, how much is it increased by?

I am thinking maybe a separate topic for solar panels and keeping batteries alive. There are some interesting things that come up because we are charging batteries in particular, which is mostly affected by current levels and so small changes in efficiency wont change much there.