Anyone recording the total eclipse on their solar array?

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RegGuheert

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 19, 2012
Messages
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Location
Northern VA
I'm interested to see a video of the production of someone's Enphase (or other) array as the Moon passes over. I'll try to post a video from our array if it is not too cloudy, but we are only getting about 80% of totality here.

Can someone who goes through totality please post a video (or several still images) showing what the eclipse looks like to your PV array? One thing I'm interested to see is how rapidly the production drops as well as how the inverters recover. I expect that those on the west coast will have their power collapse more rapidly than those on the east coast.
 
my solar setup has APsystems inverters and it has some tools I can review. I'm in Salt Lake City so we are not under the full and total eclipse but I heard it said that we will get about 90% so it will be interesting to see how it relates in the numbers.

the moon moves over our view of the sun from 10:13am to 1pm.

I just looked up my array and the curve is still going up to the peak, which is typically at 11:30am and that is the time that we will have the max coverage here. The curve just started to fall off from it's usual path.. so it's making a difference already. The curve is usually straight up until about 11:30am were it tapers off to about 6,800watts.
 
10_34am_Mountain_Time.png


see the flat line.. there is the moon starting to cover my array.

and at 10:40am

10_40am_Mountain_Time.png
 
i took out my special sun glasses a few minutes ago to try and see if my phone could capture it.. not easy.. not large enough so I had to use zoom.

IMG_20170821_105515068.jpg


and my array says this..

11_00am_Mountain_Time.png
 
11:33am and at it's peak here in Salt Lake City, UT.

What my phone camera sees
IMG_20170821_113350192.jpg


What my phone camera sees with a filter
IMG_20170821_113405267.jpg


It's nice and cool in, what is left of the sun.

and the array says
11_33am_Mountain_Time.png


down to 375watts right now. so it's like 8am in the morning at this time of year. Imagine if the moon did this on a daily basis.. we'd have global cooling on a big scale.
 
I'd planned on doing the same, but rain clouds moved into Minneapolis at the same time as the eclipse, so I can't see it. I do see my panels were dropping while the sun was out, but nothing cool to share. Hopefully others are luckier and we can see more arrays dropping down!
 
Here in Berkeley, CA it was too cloudy for me to see the eclipse, but my PV array clearly noticed. I have a nice half bell graph of power production versus time, with a big bite taken out by the eclipse.

Unfortunately, I don't see an easy way to share it here. mynissanleaf.com doesn't allow uploads (maybe only for supporters?), Google Drive doesn't seem to allow direct links to an image file, and my ISP doesn't provide any web hosting. I'm not interested in using a third party image hosting site. If someone else can upload it or easily host it, PM me your email and I'll send it to you.

Cheers, Wayne
 
i'm no graphic artist but I do have a copy of publisher, so I brought into two images, one of this morning and one of Saturday and overlayed them to see what today might have been without the moon passing in between the sun and the array.

here is what i managed to put together. Not perfect. but for me, it's as good as i know how to do. you can see a little bit of blurring etc. like I said.. I'm not a graphic person.

overlay_of_normal_morning_and_eclipse_morning.png



Apologies about the 1st uploaded video. I used JING to record but the format is in SWF which YT doesn't like so I used a online converter.. bad idea.. it really messed it up. I found another program to record in MP4 and it looks much better.

https://youtu.be/ADkp-s1QlZ8
 
RegGuheert said:
Thanks for that awesome image, Duncan! OTOH, I think your video should have a seizure alert on it! ;)

Yeah, sorry about that. I trusted something and I shouldn't and it was a terrible result. Anyway, I found a much better solution and the video should be fine now.
 
Thanks for this thread, guys. I really enjoyed the pics and video!

We only got to 74% here. It was neat to watch through the filtered glasses. I tried taking a picture, but it didn't come out at all. I also checked my array and it didn't seem to make an appreciable dent in production.
 
iceisfun said:
Here is the eclipse from CA

solar_eclipse.png


Enphase S280s
Welcome, iceisfun! Thanks for posting your eclipse image!

Unfortunately, I cannot view this image. In fact, I cannot load any pages from your website. I've tried both from my ISP and my cellular provider and I cannot load anything from there.

BTW, can you provide your public webpage for your solar array so that I can track it on my MTBF spreadsheet?
 
https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/pv/public_systems/7z3v1290297/overview

I have my own app that scrapes all the per inverter stats from envoy and puts them into a database and draw my own charts using d3js

I'm also doing another install with ~42 IQ6+ inverters
 
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