Yes, clouds are huge magnifying glasses!

CALLD

Tomorrow is the southern solstice, and today I've seen yet another record being smashed on my charge controller. It's a day with patchy intermittent clouds. Noon is at 12:15, it was clear and the charge controller was reading PV: 28.5V/29.2A. It's not an MPPT, just a standard 30A PWM. The combined iSC of my array is 26.1A, however its for AM 1.5 and the sun is damn near vertical at midday now.

Then came some patchy clouds at 12:40 and this is what happened as the edge of the clouds lined up with the sun:

Attachment not found.
Attachment not found.
Attachment not found.

I even briefly saw 38Amps but was not quick enough with the camera:(

Note that there is an approximate 5 volt drop between my panels and charge controller at 30A, so the voltage at the panels was at least 32volts at the time.

From an 880w array it was peaking at over 1171 watts without MPPT!

So next time you're out in partly cloudy weather and it feels like the sun is burning your skin off when it emerges from behind the clouds, you're not imagining things - it is!

mike95490

Re: Yes, clouds are huge magnifying glasses!

Attached is Attachment not found.
a photo I took from a plane flying in layered cloud conditions. The magnifying lensing effect is called a Solar Glory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_%28optical_phenomenon%29