Hi Bob;
The confusion around solar working at night is often due to the concept of solar storage, which allows MH / homes to still have energy supply at night.
The purpose of a solar panel system is to absorb sunlight, also known as photo-voltaic energy (PV), and convert it to direct current (DC) power. The DC power is sent through the system’s inverter to be converted to alternating current (AC) power, which is the type of power that most households / MH run on. At that point, the solar array can feed electricity into your MH / home.
Since solar panels can only produce power during the day, the question then becomes “how will solar panels provide power overnight when there is no sunshine?” There are two primary solutions that help to resolve that problem.
- Net metering (Not Considered at this time) and
- Solar-plus-storage technology that allow your solar panel system to access electricity overnight when solar panel production is dormant, either through connection to the electric grid (shore line) or to a battery. Thanks to grid connections and solar energy storage, solar panels are a sustainable round-the-clock energy solution.
Solar panels do work on cloudy days – they just do not perform as well as they would on a bright sunny day. Though estimates range, solar panels will generate about 10 – 25% of their normal power output on a cloudy day. It would be accurate to say that solar panels do not work as well in rainy or cloudy weather.
In my case, I was able to establish that it was the solar panel simply because I did my research during the day light (not at night) and, solar panel was feeding the lights trough the inverter, (while everything else was unplugged/disconnected) but, since the MH is constantly connected to the shore line, at night when there is no sun, the power to the lights are supplied by the inverter trough the batteries.
The problem will become more evident if I decided one day to boondock for a long period of time in cloudy and or rainy days, then I may not be stuck forever!!!
Hope I answered your question.