Adding Additional Solar to Charge Batteries for Boat

[Fishbreath]

Hello Solar Gurus.

I currently have a Northstar 850 Pop up camper with solar. It has one Renology 150 watt panel that runs into a Renology CTRL-WND30 controller through a 10ga cable. This charges one deep cycle battery and does a wonderful job of keeping my house battery charged.

I have a matching Renology panel and controller sitting in the garage.

I spend a lot of time fishing and would like to charge additional batteries that power the trolling motor on my personal pontoon.

How would YOU set this up? I can add the second panel and run it through the existing controller and then set up the house battery and the aux battery using the "two battery" wiring system.

Or,

I can hook up the second panel, run it through the the new controller and have a "stand alone" charging system for the aux batteries.

The obvious advantage to hooking it up through the original system would be that the house battery would get 300 watts of solar when there is no "aux" battery in the system.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Bill

[mike-s]

If the existing system is sufficient for your typical use, leave it be. Use the second system to charge other batteries. But connecting different batteries, with different use profiles together for charging isn't good.

[BFL13]

You can have the two sets on the same battery and they will add their amps. That is, two controllers on the same battery, so you don't have to mess around swapping one panel over to the other set to just have one controller. Adjust both controllers to the same voltage though, 14.8 or whatever.