Test Battery and Solar Panel Output

well I kind of knew this day was coming these mighty mule gate fence openers other reviews that I read about him said that they really only last two or three years we're at the three-year mark here is the fence controller bad or is the battery bad I sure hope it's not the solar panel the solar panel seems to look really good so first of all my wife couldn't get the gate to open this morning so first thing we're going to do is hit the button and see so if it's taken even a tiniest amount of solar charge into the battery then the gate should open let's give her a try it's working now so the gates working but it's a little bit on the sluggish side and these already run a little bit slow anyway I'm very very happy with the mighty mule very very happy with it it saved us from having to get out in the wind and the rain and the snow but I anticipated some problems and I think it's just my battery so let's pull the steep cycle battery out and check it out so the way this setup works is there's a deep cycle battery in this box now normally you would only have just a tiny rechargeable battery but I thought I'd go the extra mile and throw in a nice big deep cycle battery we need to disconnect the battery and see if we're getting any voltage off of our wires here whether we're getting a charge from our trickle charger our trickle solar charger here so let's unhook that all right so our battery is disconnected for I'll throw my voltmeter on here and see what we get and this would be DC volts okay so the battery is putting out eight volts not good let's see if we're getting a charge here and I am showing a trickle charge of 0.4 10.40 hmm I don't know I don't know if the solar panels working either so it could be a failed solar panel causing the battery to not hold a charge it didn't hold a charge just fine before I got some work to figure out here let me mess with it bit the folks what I need to do is get underneath the back of the solar panel and there's some information on here that'll tell me how many volts or millivolts this thing will put out and you know we you're not in a very ideal situation this is south that is north I've got it kind of facing a little bit southwest but that was kind of the only way that I can make this work okay the trees over here we're blocking the sunlight most of the day and you really want to face south so that it can pull the maximum amount of sunlight in well it's not doing that however this gate worked for a year with no problems…