CA Traveler wrote:
The battery box should be sealed with 2 vent hoses one high and one low.
Seperating parallel batteries (if that is your plan) by 8' means unbalanced batteries ie load/charge usage distribution will be unequal. You might want to research this.
Have you considered switching to 2x GC batteries instead?
I'm using some heavy gauge wiring to connect the batteries. I plugged it into a voltage drop calculator and it seems reasonable. I'm no expert, and please correct me if I am wrong, but during the final stage of battery charging the current is pretty low (just a few amps going into the battery). When the amps are low like this, there is very little voltage drop. I suppose it is possible that one battery (closest) could get finished charging a bit sooner, but with solar doing lots of charging everyday it seems like the furthest battery would easily get caught up. Not sure, but the difference could be quite minor.
Regarding using 2x GC batteries...A good suggestion. However, right now I've got two Group 29s that each are at ~100AH. Adding a 3rd will get me to ~300AH which is what I'm looking for. Two GCs only gets me to ~225-230AH.
Part of my reason for adding a 3rd battery is that I also am installing a 2000w pure sine wave inverter. It will mostly just be for TV/DVD, computers and misc items, but also I want to be able to run my 900w microwave. From what I've read, two batteries might not be quite enough so I like the idea of adding a 3rd battery which will increase my capacity by 50% and spread the high amp draw out by 33.3%. For example: With 2 batteries and assuming the microwave will draw 100 DC amps through the inverter, each battery would be supplying ~50amps. By adding a 3rd battery, each one would only be supplying ~33.3amps which to me seems a lot easier on the batteries, wiring, etc. I have a parallel set of 3 AWG wires going from the batteries to the inverter to minimize voltage drop also.
-Chris
