Yesterday the final connections were made between the solar panels and the controller. The weather was partly cloudy though and the motorhome was sitting in the driveway partially shaded by some pine trees. Under these conditions the performance was pretty bad, with the charging current registering less than 3 amps on the Trimetric battery monitor. It was late in the afternoon, so I decided to put the motorhome back in the storage for the night.
Today, the morning clouds started to clear up around noon so I went back to the storage and backed the rig out into the sunshine for another test. Much better! Now the batteries are seeing a charge current of better than 15 amps. I tilted the panels up 30 degrees using some temporary pieces of wood and the current increased to 18 amps.
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| Panels Soaking Up The Sun |
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| View From The Top |
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| All Panels Wired In Parallel To A Common Point |
The Trimetric monitor was showing a small load on the batteries of approximately 1-2 amps before turning on the solar system (I'm not sure from where yet). The monitor measures all current into or out of the batteries via a current shunt. This means that the current from the solar controller is actually 1 or 2 amps higher than that shown on the monitor. This would put it at 19-20 amps (with monitor showing about 18 amps). This is right in line with the sum of the rated currents of the panels.
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| 17.9 Amps Net Current Into The Batteries | | | |
The next test was to turn on the Xantrex 2000 watt inverter and power up the 120V system. I then turned on the 26" LCD HD television, DVD player and the refrigerator (running on propane, but still drawing a small amount of current from the 12V system). Still getting a net current of 5 amps into the batteries.
That's it! The system is now operational. With time left over to watch some of the Masters golf tournament on solar power.
