Mounting isn’t too much of a problem. I think I can mount the ISS on a pole on the house wall or the small wall that runs tound round part of the edge of the flat roof. The heating and humidity effect of the roof environment is the real concern. Maybe I’m overreacting…if the FARS is designed to cope with the ISS exposed in full direct sunlight, then maybe any extra radiation from the walls/roof isn’t going to affect things very much?
The standard ISS appears to have one solar panel on the SIM (?) cover (I’ve not picked up all the new terminology yet!). There’s a replacement SIM cover with the FARS unit which has two solar panels on it. It’s difficult to tell from the small pictures I can find of the VP2 with 24-hour FARS, but that appears to have a single solar panel on the SIM cover and an additional solar panel alongside the radiation shield. The extra panel looks like it might be bigger than the one on the SIM cover, so maybe that’s the difference…a bigger panel is needed to charge the battery and run the fan simultaneously. If that’s true, then I would have thought it might be possible for someone to come up with an addon with a suitable solar panel plus battery that uses the same plugs/sockets as the FARS addon to turn it into a 24-hour model. I’d have thought that a suitable solar panel plus battery would only cost