Arco M51quad lams [RE-wrenches]

[Michael Welch]

Hi Todd. Thanks for the walk through memory lane. Some info, then back to editing!

Home Power has some old info on the M52 quadlams from Richard Perez's and Sam Coleman's testing.

But indications from back HP issues are that the M52s were the quadlams, and the old Arco M51s that were sold from the Carrizo Plains systems were sold as individual modules, along with the Arco 16-2000s.

Early on, the M52s were being sold as pre-racked and pre-wired trilams, until it was realized they did not put out enough voltage when they got hot to effectively charge 12 volt batteries, then quadlams were introduced.

Also this, from HP#35 a Letters response from Chris Greacen:
... a “quadlam” is four ARCO M52 panels in series. Each M52 puts out about 6 Amperes at 4 Volts. Quadlams are grouped into “Golds”, “Bronzes”, and Muds” depending on how abused they were during their life in a commercial solar plant in Carrizo Plains, California. Many of the panels were used with concentrating mirrors, and the “Muds” especially suffered from the heat, with surfaces turning brown from the heat and light. I've been told that the Ethylene Vinyl Acetate used to seal the modules formed small amounts of acetic acid, which erodes the metalization (traces and contacts) and darkens the cells’ anti-reflective coating.

We've noticed a bit of degradation of the cells’ contacts on our set of “Golds”. Muds will be more degraded. We've only tested bronzes and golds. Electrically, they perform very well. We found our golds to be about 20% underrated in power output, whereas new modules tend to be overrated. If you plan to buy muds, understand that they don't come with frames. This makes installing them a little more difficult. Also, if you’re short on space, I wouldn't recommend ‘lams. They use about twice the area per watt as, say, a Siemens M55. But as far as dollars per watt, they’re the best show in town.

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Apparently, there were also "Copper" quadlams, which were the ones tested by Sam Coleman.

I also found some old Microads that listed M51 at 36 watts, no other info in the ads.

A 1993 AEE ad was selling some M51s from "a Washington State utility company" and rated them at 40 watts, the difference being because they were not browned as much as the Carrizo modules, stating "everyone knows that there is no sun in Washington." The ad also states 2.4 amps at 16.5 volts.  (The same ad was also selling Dynamote Brutus pure sine wave inverters, by the way.)


Warren Lauzon wrote at 05:33 PM 07/24/2007:
 
>I vaguely recall they were about 19 volts in the quad at around 43 watts.. but that was like 300 years ago.
>
>>Any of you old timers out there know the specs on Arco M51 quadlams?
>>
>>Thanks in advance,
>>
>>Todd


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