Before moving on, I decided to test the charging setup since its nearly completed already. I used alligator clips to connect the AC plug to the AC power supplies.
... and if we look closer, yay LEDs on the dc-dc converters. However, I'm not sure how visible those will be once the other panels are on haha.
And the AC power supplies LEDs are quite hidden (that little green bit is the LED and it is lit). I may be able to bend them so they're more viewable which would be a good idea.
I also threw it on my kill-a-watt and was actually pleasantly surprised. The cell voltages were all very close to 3.9V and the converters are set to put out 4A. There are 5 chargers going for each series string. Doing a little math brings that to 78W of actual charging going on. As we can see, this is pulling 100W (actually 98W at time of testing). This gives us a decent charging efficiency of 79.5%. That would mean roughly the AC power supply is about 90% efficient and the dc-dcs are also 90%. I was not expecting it to be quite that high. I was thinking more like 70% total efficiency.
