I have a few Rainwise Mark III stations scattered about, and with winter coming I'm putting a new 6 volt gel cell battery in those which are hard to get to. Several times this summer I had the display console hypen-out so I suspect the battery. Cheap enough to put a new one in that I've done some discharge testing on.
Of course there very well could be something going on with the charge circuit in the station, too. Impossible to tell.
A few years ago when Rainwise was still Rainwise and located in Maine, I had a discussion with the tech (when you could get a call back, nice enough person) about this and he really dodged the issue and finally said he couldn't give me information on checking the charge circuit because proprietary and all, but suggested a battery swap since the circuit rarely was the cause for problems. I declined to buy and ship their recommended battery and put in a brand name one locally for about 1/3 the cost and has been fine in that unit for years.
Anyway, as winter has delayed and given me more time, I am hoping to do a test on the solar panels. I know they are 6 volt units, but have no idea of any of the other specs on them.
I know that some Davis Vantage Pro stations have had a long life of their solar panels, but members in those groups have had some that were 'weak' or just crazing over so the voltage and current supplied to the supercaps was down.
1) Does anyone know what the unloaded panel voltage should be (that is, unplug from motherboard and measure voltage across unattached terminals of the panel?
2) How much current should be produced in bright sun?
I was thinking of bread boarding up a resister to use as a load and see what kind of voltage would be stable and also measure the current going through it to see if there is such a thing as a 'weak' panel. Is this something the intrepid members here have done at one time or another?
3) If one were to need an equivalent panel, are there sources for these, like eBay or DigiKey, etc?
Thanks for any thoughts. Dale
