I am new to this forum, my previous forum experience having been on RV specific forums, but one poster suggested that this was a better place for solar questions than any RV specific location and I suspect that is right. I had posted this specific question on the RV forum but got only a few responses and am hoping that I will have better luck here. This is largely copied from that original post.
We have gone from a 30 amp Zamp solar controller on our previous RV to a Thor Manufacturing (not Thor Industries) 30 amp solar controller (Amazon link here) in our new RV. Both are PWM but I find myself puzzled by some of the setup options and the manual is only of limited help. And the "technical support" people do not return calls, which might mean that they know even less than I about the setup settings, so I thought I would ask some general questions here. Not about this particular solar controller (which is rare enough to not even have any Amazon reviews) but rather general in nature.
The Zamp controller has 4 wires, 2 to the solar panels and 2 to the batteries, but the Thor Manufacturing has 6 wires, 4 hooked up as with the Zamp controller but 2 to the "Load". That puzzles me since I would have thought that the load was the combined electric usage of the RV and that that would come from the battery, not the solar controller. What is the purpose of the load connections on the solar controller? If it is to measure the amount of power going to the load does it do that for all of the used power?
I thought it would be relatively easy to replace the solar controller, either with another PWM or an MPPT if I could find one that would fit in the space, but the Zamp that I am familiar with only has the 4 connections and I am not sure what the result of not hooking up the "load" wires might be, and the same issue exists for the MPPT controllers that I saw. In addition this solar controller is mall and it is not clear that any other similar controller will fit in the space.
My last question is whether anyone is familiar with a well supported 6 wire 30 amp PWM solar controller that I might use to replace this one if I find I can't get this one to work properly. If it makes any difference the new RV came with 400 watts of rooftop solar and I had them move the 200 AH Battleborn Lithium batteries and the 30 amp Victron DC-DC Charger from my old RV to this one, so any solar controller I used would have to have a Lithium profile.
Any help would be appreciated.
Just in case anyone is interested, the one question I had about this particular solar controller was what the proper Load Mode would be for normal usage. The manual lists 18 of them, and I don't even know what Load Modes are. Of the 18 modes listed the only 2 that made any sense to me were the Manual and Default values. I initially set it up as Default thinking that a default value was probably a good initial choice but the Manual Mode description says that it allow the user to turn the load on and off manually. I don't see any way to do that (there is no ON and OFF entries or buttons) and I don't know which would be the initial setting for Manual, but today I changed the setting to Manual assuming that it would be no worse than Default and might turn the "Load" connections (whatever that means) off.
We have gone from a 30 amp Zamp solar controller on our previous RV to a Thor Manufacturing (not Thor Industries) 30 amp solar controller (Amazon link here) in our new RV. Both are PWM but I find myself puzzled by some of the setup options and the manual is only of limited help. And the "technical support" people do not return calls, which might mean that they know even less than I about the setup settings, so I thought I would ask some general questions here. Not about this particular solar controller (which is rare enough to not even have any Amazon reviews) but rather general in nature.
The Zamp controller has 4 wires, 2 to the solar panels and 2 to the batteries, but the Thor Manufacturing has 6 wires, 4 hooked up as with the Zamp controller but 2 to the "Load". That puzzles me since I would have thought that the load was the combined electric usage of the RV and that that would come from the battery, not the solar controller. What is the purpose of the load connections on the solar controller? If it is to measure the amount of power going to the load does it do that for all of the used power?
I thought it would be relatively easy to replace the solar controller, either with another PWM or an MPPT if I could find one that would fit in the space, but the Zamp that I am familiar with only has the 4 connections and I am not sure what the result of not hooking up the "load" wires might be, and the same issue exists for the MPPT controllers that I saw. In addition this solar controller is mall and it is not clear that any other similar controller will fit in the space.
My last question is whether anyone is familiar with a well supported 6 wire 30 amp PWM solar controller that I might use to replace this one if I find I can't get this one to work properly. If it makes any difference the new RV came with 400 watts of rooftop solar and I had them move the 200 AH Battleborn Lithium batteries and the 30 amp Victron DC-DC Charger from my old RV to this one, so any solar controller I used would have to have a Lithium profile.
Any help would be appreciated.
Just in case anyone is interested, the one question I had about this particular solar controller was what the proper Load Mode would be for normal usage. The manual lists 18 of them, and I don't even know what Load Modes are. Of the 18 modes listed the only 2 that made any sense to me were the Manual and Default values. I initially set it up as Default thinking that a default value was probably a good initial choice but the Manual Mode description says that it allow the user to turn the load on and off manually. I don't see any way to do that (there is no ON and OFF entries or buttons) and I don't know which would be the initial setting for Manual, but today I changed the setting to Manual assuming that it would be no worse than Default and might turn the "Load" connections (whatever that means) off.