AlbertaNewbie wrote:
The meter shows panel voltage, ah, Watts at panel, Watts at battery, voltage at battery, the daily logs, vmax, vmin, current amps to battle.......well worth the $100.
AlbertaNewbie, when you drive "The Highway" - there is only one highway in Canada, everybody knows this :) - road signs show all kind of info. But you only need to know how far is Bannf (or wherever you are going), and whether there are any speed limits.
I don't have a Trimetric so people will correct me if I'm wrong about its features.
Controller shows volts and amps at the battery, and so does Trimetric.
Controller doesn't show net current or AH in or out, but Trimetric does. To me this latter Trimetric feature is not important because, like people said, if Full stage has been reached at least once a day, this all doesn't matter, and in my system they are full 9 days out of 10.
Volts at the panel before controller - Trimetric wouldn't show this, yes. I have these panel volts on controller, but, with my controller being MPPT, those volts are so different from volts on the battery that I don't know what to do with this data :)... Volts before PWM controller - can't say, let PWM users explain if this is important (or why $5 voltmeter can't be used for that).
Volts after controller the controller display also shows, and so does Trimetric.
The only thing that Trimetric doesn't show - among those that I would think to be of at least "some" use - is the log of charging stages and peak wattage achieved. Without Trimetric, this daily log would tell whether battery was ever Full. And Trimetric will tell you this - by counting AH in and out. Btw, even if there is no display and no Trimetric, LED indicators on TS 60 would tell this if you look at them.
There are data in controller log that Trimetric won't gather in the same way as controller does - like peak wattage from panels. This is the wattage that panels achieved at some moment (when you maybe didn't even need it), it's not indicative of daily energy harvest.
