Am I correct in thinking that as the sun gets lower in the year it produces less radiated heat to my jam jar solar tempreture sensor.
If that is the case, is there anyway of automatically adjusting for this or do I have to change temp for 100% as the months change?
At the moment is a sunny day but I am only showing 73% solar
Anybody help on this one please
Not sure what you are actually recording because you said
jam jar solar tempreture sensor.
I have a solar sensor that came with my station and looking at the past couple days, it has reached upwards of 900 on a scale of 0 to 1000 every day but appears to be dropping slightly as time goes by. I only have three days of samples to look at though.
And it is listed as Solar Radiation.
Solar Energy on the other hand is quite a different scale, from 0 to 7 and it has been roughly the same every day peaking at about 6.5 every day.
What is interesting to watch is when clouds go over. The solar readings drop but the UV stays about the same with only a slight dip.
Reminds me of my worst sunburns which took place on overcast days.
The dip during the day would be a good indicator of cloud cover at least as long as the sun is supposed to be up. After sunset, you get nothing out of either of course.
As to your question… I don’t know. It appears no adjustment is necessary to mine as it does appear to be changing slightly as the days go by, but I will see a better trend in a week or so.
Am I correct in thinking that as the sun gets lower in the year it produces less radiated heat to my jam jar solar tempreture sensor.If that is the case, is there anyway of automatically adjusting for this or do I have to change temp for 100% as the months change?
At the moment is a sunny day but I am only showing 73% solar
Just so nobody is confused, the 100% value used for the regular (optical) sensor does vary according to the date. I would have thought that’s the same value used for the temp-in-a-jar system too, but I doubt that temp-in-a-jar is a very accurate solar measurement.
BrianM,
I have the sensor in a jar and never change the values and it still works perfectly. The way it works is comparing the outside temperature to the temperature inside the jar. No matter how cold or low the sun it still heats the air inside. My values in the solar sensor setup are .5 and 16.1