solar panel hooked directly to battery
I've heard of some folks hooking a small solar panel directly to the battery to charge or maintain it. But some panels (my 70W, for instance) can peak its output as high as 17V. My question is, how ...
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MrWizard wrote:
'knock down' is not the right term
PWM means Pulse Width Modulation
the power is pulse on and off hundreds of time a second to maintain a set point voltage aka 14.?
the higher the battery voltage (state of charge) the shorter the on time of the pulse and the longer the OFF time between pulses
thats the simple basic straight forward explanation of the operation
Thanks for that explanation. So if I'm understanding correctly, the PWM may not be pulsing off much (or at all) when the battery voltage (and charge level) is very low. Interesting! I can see now why a direct charge (without controller) wouldn't be appreciably faster.
