Dry camping, battery idea?
We're scheduled to pick up our brand new Keystone Premier Bullet 19FBPR in early May. I'm pretty excited, but we'll be dry camping for two weeks and I have a couple questions regarding battery life. ...
Forum Discussion
pianotuna wrote:
Hi ExxWhy,
To be fair, the panels I use are more shade tolerant than some others. Quite frankly, I got lucky when I chose the components. I got lucky a second time by choosing to have 33 volts going into the controller.
If there is going to be shade, look for panels with diodes between each cell. However, shade tolerance is about #10 on a list of features.
#1 for me is temperature compensation with a probe on the battery bank. For example, today at -6 c (21 f) the voltage going into the battery bank was 15.3.ExxWhy wrote:
I've always wondered about solar working at all when it's not in direct sunlight. The vast majority of the time, we like to camp under trees in the shade. For that reason, the portable panels looked attractive to me. I'm still very much in the information gathering phase.
Don,
A little warmer here and heavily overcast with rain and snow, most of the day. From my single 235W polycrystaline panel, I was seeing 14.85 on the Victron. This is with temp compensation hooked to a Morningstar SS MPPT-15l. I am always still amazed to see harvesting under very low light conditions.
I'm mentioning it so others can know what to expect out of a garden variety poly module (I do have it tilted, but fixed, pointing South).
