Why one shaded panel can tank your whole array's output — or barely register at all — depending entirely on which inverter architecture is wired underneath it.
A chimney shadow crosses one panel for twenty minutes a day. Does the array lose "one panel's worth" of production, or a lot more than that? The honest answer is: it depends entirely on how the panels are wired to their inverter(s). Three architectures dominate the market — string, microinverter, and power-optimizer (DC-optimized string) — and they respond to that exact same shaded panel in three very different ways, for reasons that trace straight back to basic circuit theory.