Is your solar panel receiving full, bright sunlight?
Do your motors spin freely by hand and with
a good 12V battery?
Have you measured voltage drop on the solar panel
(in bright sunlight) with a smaller known load
(such as a 120 Ohm resistor = 100mA)?
A little more experimentation should provide answers.
I'll throw some possibilities at ya:
Are the fans the correct type of motor design to run on DC current? For example a three phase motor won't run on a single phase motor's power supply.
Is it possible that solar panels do not or cannot supply power continuously at a certain rate? I built a solar panel powered robot once, it needed capacitors to budge every few seconds.
Check your connections.
You have a 12 V, 10 W panel. The panel voltage varies based on the amount of load attached. The panel power is dictated by the amount of solar light impinging on the panel. You need to ensure you get enough light. You can attach multiple panels in parallel if one is not enough for your fans until you get them to run.
Of course the panel is not able to feed enough amps or the fan is a brushless type which is meant to run on a low current(0.1-0.2amps) 12 volt AC.Try using a transformer (AC) not DC I.e. without diodes
Is it because the amperage is too high? I have a 10 watt solar panel thats rated 12v. I got two computer CPU fans all 12vdc but with different amps. One is 1.2w (or 0.1A) and another is 0.6A. Weird thing is, the 0.6A one is actually about half the size of the big 1.2W one. I used a 9V battery to try to run it, and the 1.2W is trying to turn but stalling and theres this buzzing sound. The 0.6A one turns when atttached to the battery but not to a 6V battery. I attached my solar panel which I just measuered 0.89W and 12v to the fans and they don't even twitch. Why is that? I also tried my 6v, 0.5 A panel on some toy car motors that can handle 5 (1.5v) AA batteries=7,5V but no go there either. When I measured the overall voltage, it dropped to around 0V across the panel and across the fan too. Why is that?
