Evaluation of Long-Term Performance of a Solar Home System (SHS) Monitoring System on Harsh Environments

Abstract

Dataloggers installed in rural regions of developing countries need to be autonomous, robust, and have good recording capacity as they may be exposed to harsh environmental conditions. An extremely hot, dry, and dusty climate can imply additional wear and tear toequipment. A test procedurewas designed and run in a confined space to control climate conditions to test the datalogger. An outdoor campaign lasting more than three years was performed at the Instituto Madrileño de Estudios Avanzados (IMDEA) Water Institute, in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid, Spain) and at the Escuela Politécnica Superior (EPS) Linares (Jaén, Spain) to test the low-cost datalogger under real conditions. The results demonstrated that it was robust and endured extreme weather conditions. In order to avoid the loss of data, a new version with a redundant system based on an SD card was implemented and tested under real conditions.