nightly production solar panel?

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Benti

New User
Location
Belgium
Occupation
nurse
Hi,

Recently we have placed Hyundai 395W solar panels on our roof. Each panel has an Enphase IQ7+ inverter.
Right in front of our house is a street light.

I've noticed in the Enphase app that my solar panels are producing at night.
It comes to about 0.1 tot 0.2kwh.
Is this possible? Or is this an error in the app?

Roel
 

Hv&Lv

Senior Member
Location
-
Occupation
Engineer/Technician
Probably a fluke, but possible considering how different types total their production.
Remember the calculators with little solar panels in them? They worked with room lighting.

While the solar panels will try to turn any reasonable amount of light into electricity the amount of light in a streetlight is so low it won’t ever do any real usable production.
 

gadfly56

Senior Member
Location
New Jersey
Occupation
Professional Engineer, Fire & Life Safety
Probably a fluke, but possible considering how different types total their production.
Remember the calculators with little solar panels in them? They worked with room lighting.

While the solar panels will try to turn any reasonable amount of light into electricity the amount of light in a streetlight is so low it won’t ever do any real usable production.
What might a full moon get you on a clear night?
 

winnie

Senior Member
Location
Springfield, MA, USA
Occupation
Electric motor research
My guess is error in the app. As a rough order of magnitude guess, use 100K lux for daylight and 10 lux for the streetlight, and ignore spectral differences. A 10kW array might produce 1W of power under the street light. 0.01kWh of production I might believe. 0.2kWh? no way.

-Jon
 

synchro

Senior Member
Location
Chicago, IL
Occupation
EE
It's possible that the reported kWh is from an RMS measurement that ignores whether the current is in-phase or out-of-phase with the voltage. If so, at least some of the reported kWh might actually be power from the grid that's supplying any idling currents of the inverters.
 

GeorgeB

ElectroHydraulics engineer (retired)
Location
Greenville SC
Occupation
Retired
I agree with an app error. We lost power, no grid voltage at all, for about 14 hours this past Feb 27 my ~4kW M215 micro inverter Enphase "system" reported mid-day production in the 200W range. Or maybe it WAS energizing a dead line? Duke would NOT be happy.
 

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jaggedben

Senior Member
Location
Northern California
Occupation
Solar and Energy Storage Installer
Sometimes Enphase production gets time stamped incorrectly when there's a gap in communication between the microinverters and the monitoring device. The inverters don't actually timestamp the production; the monitoring device extrapolates that from when it gets reported. Often it fills in an average over a long time. That would be my guess.

Otherwise, a nearby powerful streetlight is 1000 times more likely than the moon.
 
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