2nd solar panel connect together or wire up separately

From my understanding to align solar panels...Is to lay them facing North, tilted at the approx. latitude. That means (say) Sydney the angle would be about 34 degs, Brisbane about 28 degs- and if you were on the Equator they'd lie flat..
I assume there would be some variance from summer/winter.

If you lay them flat on the ground you will only get approx. half the output...facing north at approx. 45 degrees .....depending on where you are , is in my experience gives best output..and of course they must be in full sun . I made up a bracket leg that is attached at the back on a hinge and a length of rope back to the bottom of the panel , just pull the leg out and it is set at the said 45 degrees....we only move it about 3 times during the day to keep it more or less pointed at the sun...it is a 85w suntech...cheers

Hi Michael,

My technique for optimum angle - Adjust so that the panel throws the biggest shadow, i.e. intercepts the maximum amount of sunlight. The angle is not very critical. (A mathematician would point out that we are dealing with a sine curve, and that's pretty close to it's maximum over a fair angular range.)

Wiring - I use 2 panels. Simply wired in parallel. You won't exceed the 10 amps which (I think) your controller is rated at.

I find moving panels to follow the sun is worth doing a few times per day, certainly not as frequently as every hour.

An interesting fact that I'd overlooked until recently -
My camp uses about 35 Ah per day. A 60W panel will provide about 3.5 A in good sunlight, that's about 20 Ah per day, which is some help. With my 130Ah storage (and using only 2/3 of that in order to preserve battery life), I can remain stationary with the 60W panel for about 5 days instead of 3. If I could harvest 40 Ah per day I'd have ample to last until the sun stops shining. I've added another 85W panel, and now have more electricity than I need. The two turn in about 9 amps in full sunlight, over 50 Ah per day, so aiming them accurately at the sun is not an issue - I can afford to be suboptimal.

(I expect an argument about the above statement that a 60W panel only supplies about 3.5 Amps. Fact is it's a fact! Solar panels are rated at their highest power output, which occurs at about 17.5V. Hence a 60W panel provides about 3.5A x 17.5V = about 60W. But for battery charging we can only use up to about 14.4V, not the full 17.5. The 3.5 Amps is available, but because of the reduced voltage, the 60W is not.)

I'd suggest that you best approach is to keep the two panels together, both looking approximately at the sun from around 9am to 3pm - simply facing north and angled for biggest shadow should do it. It's important to use heavy gauge cable since you will be moving a few amps and can't afford much voltage drop.

HTH

John