recently I bought 3 solar panels rated at 5V 200 mA each. I want to use them to charge a 5V battery bank to charge a phone. Thinking about the proper way to put them, I thought i can connect all in parallel to get maximum current, but realized that if the sun light was a little weak it will no generate full 5v thus preventing charging. So I decided to put 2 in parallel to give the equivalent of one 5V solar panel, connected in series with the 3rd panel to give the equivalent of 10v. sacrificing a little current to get higher voltage, to allow the charging to happen on a wider range of sun light power. The following picture shows the wiring and the schematic I intend to replicate.
Now that I have an equivalent of 10v, 400mA solar panel. I used a 7805 voltage regulator to cut down the excess to 5v.
Final step, I added a standard diode to prevent the panels from leaking the battery in the shade.
and now measuring:
Questions:
- I didn't think about this before putting the diode, but is it okay to put the blocking diode on the ground wire? because I know some applications do not use the ground except for safety (i.e. 3 phase system). it would be helpful also to avoid the 0.7v drop across the diode before the regulator.
- according to previous calculations, I'm supposed to get a maximum of 10v output before regulation, and considering that the sun was pretty shinny today, why was the reading I got not more then 6v? I have measured across each panel seperatly and got around 5.5V, are the connections right?