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Plastic melted together on two Anderson Plugs this weekend, and thoughts why?
Anderson Plug Melted.jpg
Not the best pic, but you can see the red plug is fine, but the black connector is melted together.
These are 100 watt panels, putting put around 18 volts and an IOC of around 6 amps. I had four in parallel, each string had a 10 amp circuit breaker, and no breakers tripped. The Anderson plugs are rated at 30 amps, and should not have seen a greater of 6 amps through it. It goes:
Solar Panels --> 10 amp Circuit breakers Connected with Anderson Plugs
Then
Circuit Breaker --> Combiner with 10 gauge wire in screw terminals.
Then
Combiner --> SCC with 10 gauge wire with MC4 connectors
I have four of these portable 100 watt panels, and I thing it melted because the wiring from the back of the panel on the diode box is too skinny:
Lion Energy Solar Panels Diode Box.jpg
Hard to tell from the picture, but the cable consists of two pair wire where the entire cable is about as thick as 6 gauge wire, but each of the two pairs is 16 AWG, which to me is way to skinny to be putting 6 amps through, never mind these panels come from the factory with connections to place up to four of them in parallel which means 24 amps at 12 volts would be flowing through that 16 gauge wire.
What I'm thinking of doing to fix this is to remove the factory wiring and replace this with 12 gauge wires. My roof mounted Renogy 100 watt panels I have use 12 gauge wires coming off the panel to an MC4 connector, so me doing the same to these panels would match Renogy's specs.
These 400 watts of portable panels produced more KWh than my 600 watts roof mounted. When the roof mounted was flat, they produced 40% more; when the roof mounted were tilted, these portable panels produced 10% more. The portable panel surplus was most noticeable and also got me three or four hours extra of production with me tilting them towards the sun at sunrise and sunset.
Anderson Plug Melted.jpg
Not the best pic, but you can see the red plug is fine, but the black connector is melted together.
These are 100 watt panels, putting put around 18 volts and an IOC of around 6 amps. I had four in parallel, each string had a 10 amp circuit breaker, and no breakers tripped. The Anderson plugs are rated at 30 amps, and should not have seen a greater of 6 amps through it. It goes:
Solar Panels --> 10 amp Circuit breakers Connected with Anderson Plugs
Then
Circuit Breaker --> Combiner with 10 gauge wire in screw terminals.
Then
Combiner --> SCC with 10 gauge wire with MC4 connectors
I have four of these portable 100 watt panels, and I thing it melted because the wiring from the back of the panel on the diode box is too skinny:
Lion Energy Solar Panels Diode Box.jpg
Hard to tell from the picture, but the cable consists of two pair wire where the entire cable is about as thick as 6 gauge wire, but each of the two pairs is 16 AWG, which to me is way to skinny to be putting 6 amps through, never mind these panels come from the factory with connections to place up to four of them in parallel which means 24 amps at 12 volts would be flowing through that 16 gauge wire.
What I'm thinking of doing to fix this is to remove the factory wiring and replace this with 12 gauge wires. My roof mounted Renogy 100 watt panels I have use 12 gauge wires coming off the panel to an MC4 connector, so me doing the same to these panels would match Renogy's specs.
These 400 watts of portable panels produced more KWh than my 600 watts roof mounted. When the roof mounted was flat, they produced 40% more; when the roof mounted were tilted, these portable panels produced 10% more. The portable panel surplus was most noticeable and also got me three or four hours extra of production with me tilting them towards the sun at sunrise and sunset.
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