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JiminDenver's avatar
JiminDenver
Explorer II
May 27, 2014

Solar charge controller, how clean is the power?

How clean is the power coming out of a charge controller? In my case it is MPPT.

The reason I ask is I had planned on using the solar to boost the 8-D while the inverter runs heavy loads. The caps in the cheapo inverter can be damaged by ripple effect of which I know nothing about. I'd rather run the load, turn off the inverter and then charge it back up with the panels if a CC can cause these ripple effects.

Now to go look up ripple effects.

7 Replies

  • Hi Don,

    The panels should do 35a or so at peak so I don't know if the controller will be powering smaller loads or if the battery is doing it and being recharged. It doesn't take long before the discussion elevates beyond my limited training.
  • Thank you all. I appreciate the help and knew you'd have the answers. :)
  • If you simply -have- to have something in there, purchase a giant electrolytic capacitor from one of those car audio boom-boom supplies. A 1-Farad cap will clean power so much it would make the reputation of Mother Teresa look sketchy.
  • I believe the ripple comes from poor filtering of rectified 60 cycle power.
    These DC-DC converters operate at 20,000+ cycles and ripple is a non-issue.
  • In all my time on rv.net, I've never heard of an inverter being damaged by any solar charge controller, be it PWM or MPPT. The battery tends to buffer out the current draw, AFAIK.

    I have read about the ripple effect, but that is with an inverter directly attached to a fuel cell.
  • So it appears ripple comes from AC to DC conversion and MPPT is DC too DC, so it seems to be of no issue at all.

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