More Battery POWER

barbaqued wrote:
During the daylight time the batteries get charged up and I have plenty of AC power to run the TV, fan whatever. When the sun goes down I can only get about 2 good hours of AC out of the batteries before the inverter says "no more".

First let's examine why you get so little time with the 2 12s...because if they're shot, adding more to them will not help.

How old are those batteries? Do they have enough water? When you say they're charged, are they really charged? Full charging on solar is difficult.

What are you running with the inverter at night?

What is the battery capacity as well.

Your 2 batteries probably have a capacity of about 200 Ampere Hours (AH). For good battery life you should only use half of the capacity, so if the batteries are fully charged, you have about 100 AH available.

Your 1100 Watt inverter is capable of drawing 100 Amps at 12v. One hour of this will be 100 AH.

To give you any help we need to know what you are using the inverter for, as 2oldman asked.

If you have a voltmeter let us know what the battery voltage is when the sun goes down and the inverter is drawing current.

Hi,

Downsize the inverter to what is needed to run the TV. A samlex 150 watt Pure sine wave may be a good fit.

I doubt that the battery bank is getting fully charged. It takes a lot of hours to do so.

When did you last equalize them?

Also take the batteries to a good battery shop and have them load tested. An auto store is not a good battery shop.

Need input.

If all is well with your batteries, the question is - what exactly are you running at night? You can't run an A/C, microwave, and anything that is going to draw more amps than you have. The lights and TV should be no problem. A fan can be a drain - whether a roof fan or a furnace fan. Running your 12 volt electric in the sun all day, you have plenty of power because the sun is there supplying it but are you running so much that the batteries are not starting the night out fully charged? At the beginning of the night, what voltage do your batteries read? Also once the batteries go below half charge it will take longer for them to charge back to full charge and repeating the cycle the next day of running electric in the sun again may not be bringing the batteries up to full charge to start out the night.

moved from technology

'Power' questions belong in tech issues, its a chassis thing