Dashboard Alternator light

eric1514 wrote:

MrWizard wrote:
Eric1514..Ok , I'm on page 5 of 7,
Find the heavy battery cable that goes from the Intellitec to the house batteries, find the most convenient spot in that cable run to cut it and in insert a 200 amp DC circuit breaker, the marine style have push button that opens the breaker contacts so it acts like a switch, and a lever reset that closes them, this will be manually operated by you the driver when travelling, these are very reliable and can removed or replaced easily if there is ever a need to do so

Or I could put a switch on one of the two small leads running to the isolation solenoid as Pianotuna suggested. But either way, I would be losing the alternator's contribution to charging the house batteries while traveling and amps is amps.

Your alternator amps are lamed by any higher voltage charger also on the house batts, so you are not getting so many alternator amps anyway.

You can test for that with low house batts. Have the monitor on the house set to amps. See the solar amps engine off, see the alternator amps solar off, engine on AND warmed up, then see the total amps solar on, engine on warmed up.

See the amps reading on the solar controller's display, subtract from total seen on the monitor, and that is your alternator amps.
---------

You have four 6s and say, " The only issue was it took forever to replenish the batteries if I boondocked and used 150 Ah up"

You could use 120 amps on that in Bulk, but how many amps do you need to be at say 90% SOC on arrival? How long is the drive? 150/450 is 67% SOC, so it is a "67-90".

You could do that in under two hours starting at 120 amps but if the drive is four hours you don't need so many amps. You don't halve the amps and double the time--it is not linear. But at 70 amps it would only take maybe half an hour longer. Whatever, call it three hours and you have an hour left. what if it is a five hour drive?

You can drive all day and night trying to do the 90-100 so forget that.

If you shoot for 70 amps total starting at 67% SOC, and you get 55 amps from the converter off gen, you need 15 more amps. Solar might average 5 amps or whatever for the time of day and conditions, so all you need now is 10 more amps. Is a Dc-Dc going to be worth it? How many amps of a DC is needed limited by what it will pull from 1/3 the alternator spec amps?

So IMO do some math like that before spending million$ on improving the charging set-up. You might be ok even with what you have installed now doing solar and the PD.