Unfortunately, they're some off-name brand... "Automatic Power Inc"...
But, good call on the bypass. I was beside myself trying to figure out how I could rescue the other half of the panel before you clued me in on how one might go about doing it.
I cut small slits in the back side and shunted across the 2 bad cells. There was a tiny bit of damage to the one adjacent to the 'better' of the damaged ones, but that would have meant bypassing 4 cells instead of 2.
I chanced it, and it worked out just fine. It passes the same current as the other panel, albeit at a cost of 1V OTV. So what... I'm designing a buck converter (as a cheaper alternative to MPPT) and have good results so far with my 'lite' version of the circuit.
The patch job. Figured this was the safest way to go about it.
The panels side-by-side tied in series. Collectively they produce ~39V OTV @ ~1.8A Isc. 'Bout 70W by that method, approaching 10x the output of my first real panel (8W).
Real world output looks like they will be closer to about 50W, via the buck converter. My test version has significant current limiting (~800mA out, pulling ~300mA from the panels), but this was probably a good idea. Not bad for a cheapy cell phone charger tweaked to push out 14.4 instead of 5V. It's based on the 34063A chip. Dead simple, and efficient even on it's own (with no external driver transistors, it's supposedly good up to 1.5A output according to the datasheet.)
My intent is to drive 2 44Ns in tandem with 2 toroids, as I have a few of those TO-220 10A+10A dual Schottky diodes hanging around. At those power levels, I probably won't need even the first heat sink for anything. We will see.
Thanks again G, I humbly bow to the master
Steve
