Today I noticed the Tempest had gone into a “disabled active listening” for rain accumulation and “no longer wind sampling” to conserve power. The voltage is down to 2.22v. And when I look at the graph of the voltage level for recent weeks I see a lonnnng downward sloping line as the voltage decreases. And it doesn’t have any of the day-to-day peaks that happen on sunny days (and even on cloudy bright days) of which we’ve had a number recently.
So, frankly, it kind of looks like it’s not charging anymore. But I’m just guessing l. FYI, I had recently moved it to a less sunny area… Does it actually need direct sun rays to adequately charge? I’m guessing not. I will, however, move it to a brighter area today, as an experiment. I am in northern California and we just had several weeks of non-rainy, fairly bright days. So I am surprised to see this downslope of voltage with no daily spikes.
See attached screenshots of voltage graphs before and after apparent charging issue appeared.
To have real charging power the Tempest needs direct sunlight on its panels, especially in winter as the sun is not giving much at the low angle. I looked at your history and you have low solar radiation and even worse very short periods (like less than a hour a day since weeks). I honestly think your station did what it could to survive this long already.
Good decision to move it to a place where it sees way more sun (when it shines) and for as long as possible each day. At this point it will take several days of full sun to come out the near empty state. Don’t be surprised if it takes long to come back up but it has really to charge the batteries quite a lot to come back to ‘normal’.
Thank you Eric for your quick and complete response. Interesting. So it will be fun to watch it slowly recover. A few hours after I wrote you initially I got what looked like a final goodbye from Tempest as it stop transmitting. Tho, even though it’s night it has come on and off a few times.
