Setting up trimeric to work with solar panels

Bend wrote:


...

My settings are working great and I don't have to schedule my day to be near the Tri each late afternoon to do a manual reset.

Bend wrote:
It will take some time to develop trust in the Tri and your solar charging system on just what is 100% SOC. Breaking-in new batts, follow-on of aged batts, temp's, equalizing and a few other things can change what 100% displayed was a few days/weeks/months ago. The only true confirmation is a temp adjusted hydrometer after the batt is idle for a few hours.

Yes, I use L3 all the time due to the options mentioned in the OP'ed article.

Ok, well I'm not going to plan my day to reset the Trimetric every day when I know it'll really be at 100% but I'm not going to reset it every few months either; what I CAN see myself doing is setting resetting it to 100% at home before we leave and doing it again when we get home, at least that way it'll be colse while we're away for 2 - 4 weeks at a time.
Thanks for the advice.
Will

So I have had a E-meter for many years - like 18. It is basically the first meter, before the TriMetric came out.

What is happening with mine is like this. I might be at say -85 AH after a night of running things, and the satellite dish is the most popular. The solar will charge around 20 amps per hour at noon. I can easily collect 100 AH.

The E-meter will give you back power at a 'discounted' rate, so it 'attemps' to figure out how in-efficient the battery is. Say at noon it where -60 and charging at 20 amps per hour with no other loads. At 1 pm, it might read -45. This is because while 20 AH went into the battery, the meter figures that 5 AH is lost.

At the end of the day, normally by say 5 pm, the meter starts to read very close to -1 or -2 AH, and within the hour, starts reading +1 or +4, and might read +18 at sunset. It is telling you that enough amp hours went into the battery bank to totally fill it, and that some of those amp hours are just boiling away your water.

Just like your gas tank, or fresh water tank, no matter how much you put in, you start drawing it down as you take power out. So when you start using more power than the solar is putting in (say I take a shower and leave the 7.5 amp water pump on for 15 minutes solid time) this will reset the battery to -0.1 AH and keep going negative until it starts charging faster than you are consuming the power.

You would not want it to start at +18 AH and start counting backwards from that 'artificial' number. And by the meter knowing how many 'extra' amp hours it takes to fully charge the battery, it can better calculate the 'discount' rate that it counts down the energy going back into the battery bank. So if it knows that if you are at -80 AH, and it will take 108 amp hours to get to +18 AH, it will next time discount the amps going into the battery by about 22% - 25%, knowing that the extra energy is boiling away water in the battery.

I hope that I explained it the best that I could!

Fred.

It will take some time to develop trust in the Tri and your solar charging system on just what is 100% SOC. Breaking-in new batts, follow-on of aged batts, temp's, equalizing and a few other things can change what 100% displayed was a few days/weeks/months ago. The only true confirmation is a temp adjusted hydrometer after the batt is idle for a few hours.

Yes, I use L3 all the time due to the options mentioned in the OP'ed article.

Bend wrote:

Fisherguy wrote:
OK, so right now I'm an L1 user, so I need to change to L3 to turn off the auto-reset, right? But then I get the "filtered values", I'm not sure what that's all about.

How are your new settings working for you?

If you want to do manual resets, Yes, you have to go to L3 and adjust the correct P#. Then you can return to L1 and the auto-reset will be off.

Filtered values are just a moving average over a short time period that smooths out the highs and lows instead of an instantaneous/at the moment reading that may or may not be the general status. For example of a instantaneous reading: A bird flies over your panel creating a shadow for 1 second that shuts down some or all your panel, voltage and amps may be lower for that second.

My settings are working great and I don't have to schedule my day to be near the Tri each late afternoon to do a manual reset.

OK, I thought going back to L1 would mean it would go back to auto reset by default.

If I did that, why would I need to be by trimetric to reset it to 100%? If it worked properly it would know when it's back to 100% wouldn't it?

BTW, I guess you use it at L3 all the time? Spose I should play with those options a bit.

I have mine set to manual reset, and haven't had any issues or complaints. In fact with lots of sun, and not much power useage, and my solar controller set to to do an equalizing occasionally, the trimetric has on occasion shown >100% SOC. like 103%. Basically due to the fact that on recharge there is an assumed efficiency for the battery, which will effect the SOC readout vs. the actual SOC.

Fisherguy wrote:
OK, so right now I'm an L1 user, so I need to change to L3 to turn off the auto-reset, right? But then I get the "filtered values", I'm not sure what that's all about.

How are your new settings working for you?

If you want to do manual resets, Yes, you have to go to L3 and adjust the correct P#. Then you can return to L1 and the auto-reset will be off.

Filtered values are just a moving average over a short time period that smooths out the highs and lows instead of an instantaneous/at the moment reading that may or may not be the general status. For example of a instantaneous reading: A bird flies over your panel creating a shadow for 1 second that shuts down some or all your panel, voltage and amps may be lower for that second.

My settings are working great and I don't have to schedule my day to be near the Tri each late afternoon to do a manual reset.

OK, so right now I'm an L1 user, so I need to change to L3 to turn off the auto-reset, right? But then I get the "filtered values", I'm not sure what that's all about.

How are your new settings working for you?

I think the write up is a fine piece of work. 8>)

It's on this board also.

Still wish ol' BFL13 would try the conditional reset automation.

Yes it drives you crazy when the AH counter resets itself at sundown.

I have my auto reset shut off. It is possible to juggle the other settings like in the article and not get so many (or any?) unwanted resets, but I don't use any of those other settings in the first place, so no good to me.

IMO it is something to learn how it goes with your own settings and then do a fix if required.