Calling on Solar Techies
I have been thinking of going solar for some time and decided to pull the plug. My wants are a 400 to 500 watt system. I have four 12 volt batteries with 340ah. I am not planning on changing b...
Forum Discussion
1L243 wrote:
Keeping in mind I may use the lugs on the back of the Inverter for connecting my 40a charge controller (on it's own breaker) what size cable will I need to make the 5 feet from the inverter to the battery.
Feeding to inverter from solar will make no difference to the wire size need for the inverter.
Doing so will remove the possibility of turning the inverter totally off with a disconnect switch in the dc feed. I think that is a poor choice, as it means the inverter will always be drawing power.
When working on a system I want to know the power is TOTALLY shut down.
I would size the wire at 125% of the continuous load, or even at the maximum surge load. So that would be a minimum of 250 amps for the wire size. Calculator says 300 kcmil for 1% voltage drop and 4/0 for 3%.
It is better to feed the charge controller directly to the battery bank.
revision--apparently the calculator I used could not handle such a low voltage. I found another one and 1 AWG should be just fine.
