Finally, some good news about the solar panel

I have learned one lesson about buying a solar panel. Don't do it in the wintertime. Most of the last couple weekends were marred by cloudy days and snow. It's hard to comfortably do experiments when the ground is covered with snow. On workdays, I don't have time to try it before going to work. After work, it's getting dark, so there's nothing for the panel to produce energy with. About all I've been able to do is briefly try the panel out at lunchtime at work.

There were at least a few days of decent sunlight at lunch and I hooked the panel up to a battery charger for AA/AAA batteries, set for a slow charge, and it lit up. I at least now know that I can charge batteries off the sun.

I finally decided to buy a multimeter so that I can at least measure what the panel is doing. I’m happy to see that it's generating some energy. I took it out today and the panel was delivering 450 mA and that's a little better than half of what it is rated as being capable of delivering. I only get a quarter of that energy with the panel sitting in sunlight coming from a porch window, so glass is obviously eliminating some of the solar energy. I might have expected that in a new house, but mine is half a century old. On a cloudy day, the panel is only outputting around 70-80 mA. It was surprising to see how great a difference it was even though it wasn't dark. It's not as if there was only a fifth of the available light according to my eyes.

It's nice to at least see that the panel is delivering power and it's actually an amount that something can be done with it.