It has been a few days since I have seen the sun due to all the forest fire smoke on the west coast. Not sure how long it will be until we see the sun again, and that means the solar is also impacted.

Where we keep the boat we do not have power on the dock so we use 6 solar panels (2 shown below) to keep the house batteries topped off all week while we leave the refrigerator running so that we don’t have to clean it out after every trip. This is the first time since the install of the solar panels, and the replacement of the house batteries that the solar has not been able to keep up with the refrigerator running. Therefore time to defrost the fridge, and shut down all power until we have sunlight again.

I was expecting to shut down the solar panels and remove them in late September before the stormy season, I wasn’t expecting the lack of sunlight this early in the season.

There isn’t much sun getting through to our solar panels even in the middle of the day.

It has been smoky for about 6 days, with the last 2 days being really bad. You can see above with the left being today, and each day in a column to the right that the solar production has gone down hill each day. The bars for each day show the type of charging, the white being full card, and the blue and light blue being the float and absorption charge which is the topping off once the batteries are at or near full charge.

When you look at the charts above, the interesting number of “P max”, were a week ago our pmax was 461 Watts as the output from the 6 panels. Where today and yesterday we were only at max getting around 200 watts out of the system. That is not enough to keep things charged.

Yesterday and today we didn’t even hit full charge, with today being further away than yesterday.

Photo taken slightly after noon on a smoke filled day.

Perhaps by the weekend our batteries will be topped off, and perhaps the smoke will clear in the meantime.