Recent content by Metalophile

I don't know how to determine quantitatively, but for a while now my thinking is to go a few degrees less than perpendicular to the sun at noon. The reason being, not every day is sunny. When you have cloudy days it may be better to have your panels at a less steep angle in order to catch...

With those lead acid batteries, try to keep them from dropping below 24v. If they spend appreciable time under 24 volts their lives will be shortened.

Do you have a clamp meter so you can measure current at various places? I gather from that last photo that your load is being powered via AC bypass and that it is charging your battery at 27v but at zero amps. Is your battery shot and just not accepting any amps?

I agree with MichaelK that I would go with a larger inverter than 800 watts. I am powering a 9cu ft and a 7 cu ft chest freezers in my garage using 1000 watts of panels, 24v, 200AH LiFePO4 home brew battery, and 2000 watt pure sine inverter. When one freezer's compressor kicks on my battery's...

Another update. I know some folks have noticed that their EVE 280 Ah cells swell with the charging cycle. Today is a nice sunny day, and my Lishen 202Ah cells charged to 100% capacity this afternoon using my 1kW array, so I opened my battery box (a.k.a. battery ice chest) and examined my...

Is there a consensus that the swelling is caused by a breakdown of electrolyte and that breakdown of electrolyte is correlated with increased voltage? In that case it might be better to set the BMS cutoff voltage to a lower value - 3.4 or 3.45 volts so that the cells never see a higher voltage...

Not that I recommend this, but one way I sped up top balancing was to wire up my battery in its final 8S configuration and charged the pack using a large solar panel. I depended on my BMS to cut off when one cell reached 3.65V. I did watch the individual cell voltages like a hawk once it got...

So far so good. My pack is working well. I have 1kW solar array feeding it, and my load is a deep freezer and grow lights for seedlings for my garden. It is staying well balanced. I'm using the Overkill Solar 8S BMS. This system is in my garage, so the lowest temperature it sees is about 0...

That's a larger 175A connector than the 15, 30, 45A ones that hams generally use. I'm less familiar with them, but I understand that there's a convention for those, too. Since these larger ones are one piece I don't think you have to worry about it - it is marked on the connector. With the...

Exactly where was the charger attached? Did you attach it to the PV inputs of the Victron? Did you clip it to the main terminals of the battery, bypassing the BMS? Could you tell if any of the fuses had blown? What was the make and model of the charger? Was the charger sitting in that...

I use a cheap plastic ice chest, but when the lid is closed there is no ventilation. Also you have to be sure to get extra long terminals if you want to feed them through the thick walls of the ice chest.

I'm a ham radio guy so I am biased towards the Anderson Powerpoles. The 15A, 30A, and 45A sizes are interchangeable with each other - they're just designed for use with different gauge wires. The thing I like about them - you don't have to worry about whether to use a male or female - they're...

Now, of course it is important to either top or bottom balance all cells before assembling and double checking cell voltages before paralleling them to make sure they are very close.

No. Since the batteries are at the same chemistry and are in parallel (and therefore at the exact same voltage) they will have the same S.O.C. in theory. Now, I know there are sometimes deviations between theory and reality, but I wouldn't be afraid to give it a shot. The smaller battery...

I would expect, all other things being equal, same or very similar battery chemistry that the higher capacity cell would have a proportinately lower internal resistance, so higher capacity cells will tend to source more of the current load. As long as the battery + and - terminals are tied...