Tony is a Geek

learning lessons or lessons learnt? Ingenius idea.... may or may not be viable? I was watching the cycle of the battery being charged by solar panels (in November!) and then discharging by being used.  This was during the day and it was rather novel as shown below (the variance around midday was due to me fiddling around with the cabling) As I was looking at this daily data, it got me to thinking.... that tailing off of power at the end of the day, that's not good, is it?  I mean it's been great during the day, you see the batteries getting filled up, you see them being used / discharging, then up again and then down again...oh, then it got dark... and they carried on going down... and then they hit 12.3v and the ATS kicked in and switched the power over to 240v mains power.  Ah, so the battery is currently at 12.3v, powering the inverter, so that will trickle down into the 12.1v range over a few hours... and then the battery starts to enter dangerously low territory. 12v...

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 ...

Now, I bought these solar panels, the controller and the leisure battery about 3-4 years ago when I had a wonderful little Japanese Kei-car van: It was a great little 660cc powered van that we used to ferry around the basset hounds in - my plan was to fit the 2xsolar panels to the roof and allow us to have proper electricity in the van for making cups of tea / coffee and maybe have a small induction cooker or something.  However, the basset hounds passed away  ( they did make it to a glorious 12years ) and the solar panel kit moved from the back of the garage into the kitchen; where I then hooked up the solar panels onto the top of the wooden pagoda things outside the backdoor of the kitchen.  I t really was more of a "test" setup to see how it all worked.  The panels did their job, the controller did its thing, the battery got charged and I used to use it to charge the PS4 controllers and the odd phone every now & then.  Then we had a huge storm hit us call...