Solar discussion continued..

cannesdo wrote:
How do you know when you're at 50%? I do have green, orange and red lights on the control panel. Nothing below orange?

I use the CHART METHOD here...


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This of course is not absolute but gives you a close assumption that you are getting close to the 50% State Of Charge point with your batteries..

I monitor this on my BATTERY MONITOR PANEL that looks like this pictorial. The OEM % panel meters are pretty much worthless for me

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I have my Battery Monitor panel mounted in a good spot to be able to observe it when being used... I can watch BANK 1 - Bank2 or both together as well as total DC Current being drawn from the loads or how many DC Amps are being demanded by the batteries when being charged. Only thing I wish I have added was a settable AUDIO ALARM when the batteries get below a threshold like 12.0VDC etc...

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When my battery voltage drops to around the 12.0VDC range than I want to start my re-charging routines to get it back up to its 90% charge state as soon as possible. Going below the 50% charge state will start doing harm to your batteries...

My battery use was all planned out for camping off grid running the things I wanted to run... My biggest drain of course is between 6PM and 11Pm each evening and of course always have the parasitic drains to deal with. Camping at various place sometimes does not allow one to run the generator to get the batteries charged back up and this is where having solar panels will be the best PLAN B thing to have. Of course solar panels don't work except in high sun so in my case I would always have the generator around.

I am just now starting to consider installing solar panels for my setup and have been doing the generator three hour run every morning since starting to use my off-road camper and bigger batter banks in 2009. I only think of the solar panel to be battery chargers...

My new battery bank just now being planed will be two groups or two 6VDC batteries in series which will give me around 440AHs capacity replacing my current battery bank shown in this photo... This was originally two groups of two 12VDC GP24 Interstate Batteries in parallel but one died from being over-charged using a single mode converter/charger unit. I now use a PD9260C 60AMP DC Converter/charger unit

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Roy Ken