Tony is a Geek

I've been learning a lot about the solar panel & battery setup.  You may have read the UPDATE section of the previous post (if not go take a read ), where I learnt a lot more about the ATS setup and finally got all that side of the equation working.  However, I was still not happy with the solar panels & battery side of the equation.  Why not?  well, I had 2 x 110ah 12v leisure batteries hooked up to the MPPT controller and I kept noticing around 4pm-ish the remote monitor screen would be showing 12.2v and the ATS was switching over to mains-power and then the pond pumps would be running on 240v mains power all night - if I was lucky there would be sunshine / blue skies in the morning for a few hours when the batteries would charge back up to 13.1v and then the ATS would switch over to using solar again.  Then I would notice that it would run down from 13v to 12.2v pretty quickly, not instantly, but over a few hours of sunshine the batteries would drain ...

For once it seems that the planets are aligning - things are slowly but surely actually working out! I went through the setup of the solar panels with the connectors that I had and as I eluded to previously ( and the eagle eyed may have noticed ) whilst it was all setup and working things felt about 95% correct and the final 5% was niggling me.... I had setup the solar panels - all 3 of them, yes, I know odd number, I'll be ordering another one, just to make it more fun ( and I'll set them up as 2 pairs in parallel that are then connected in series - maybe? ), the new panel connectors for + and - seem to be okay, but when connecting the original 2 panels up it got a bit confusing - I originally set them all up in series as shown HERE, but I had to connect the final connectors to the wrong coloured cables that went to the MPPT - basically the solar panel positive was now connecting to the MPPT negative cable and likewise for the positive - so easy fix, just take the cables out o...