Solar test success.

[jss06]

I pulled my trailer out of the garage to give it a good cleaning. While I had it out I fixed an issue where I was getting intermittent connectivity between my solar panel and charge controller. Turns out I had not seated the Anderson power plugs completely in the housings and it was allowing the feeds to separate.

I was checking the controller to make sure it was working well after fixing the connection and and this is the result. I use a 190 watt 36V PV panel into a MPPT charge controller.
Conditions: partly cloudy around 10:30 am with the trailer facing due south. Battery mostly charged. The Fantastic fan had been running for about 15 minutes before getting the charge controller hooked back up.

1) At absorption charge rate the controller was putting out 7.6 AMPS or 101 Watts at 13.4 Volts with the Fantastic fan going. This gives me almost 80 watts of additional capacity to charge a drained battery. The Absorption charge dropped to maintenance mode in less than 10 minutes. By no means was I approaching the maximum capacity of the panel and charge controller.
2) Even when a cloud passed by and blocked the sun I was still getting almost 2 amps out of the controller in full shade. Still enough to charge the battery if all the loads are turned off.
3) The LED lights I installed pull 0.3 amps for the cubby's and 0.6 amps for the main light. Guess I will use the cubby lights most of the time and only use the main light when I need to get into the rear cabinets.

Overall very happy with the set up and how it is performing.

[ukewarrior]

Can you post the specifics of the battery you are using?

[jss06]

Can you post the specifics of the battery you are using?

It is an Optima Blue Top marine/starting battery. 75 AH I believe.
Eventually I may go LiPO. The controller I have can be programmed for almost any battery type.

[jss06]

Solar Panel:


Charge Controller:


LED Lights:


While camping off-grid, my primary draws will be the fan, LED lights, charging my cell phone, and charging my LED Coleman Lantern. The lantern will not need to be charged very often as it is good for 30+ hours on its internal battery. I do not have a lot of power requirements.

[TimC]

I want to do something similar, but, I have a 15 and a 20 watt panel. May upgrade to one a bit larger. Do you know if there are SLA batteries that are smaller than the 24 size? I really don't need that big of a battery and want to save some weight.

[jss06]

I want to do something similar, but, I have a 15 and a 20 watt panel. May upgrade to one a bit larger. Do you know if there are SLA batteries that are smaller than the 24 size? I really don't need that big of a battery and want to save some weight.

I would check batteries plus. They have a large number of 12v batteries in various sizes and amp-hour ratings. They almost all charge the same way a standard car battery does so they can be connected to charge while towing.

[H.A.]

Nice. Thats alot of capacity on the array!
No mater how cloudy & grey you should easily keep up with your loads.
And when sun is bright, its a sunshade over 1/2 of your house as well.

[jss06]

Oh I forgot one more load. Truck fridge FT41 12v/120v travel fridge. It pulls about 1.9 to 3.4 amps dependent on how cool you have it set. So that maxes out around 45 watts. This will be the one I have to watch on cloudy days and the reason I have the over sized panel.