Hi guys and gals, I'm brand new to the forum and solar systems so please go easy on me with my beginner questions.
I have a small cabin on a lake that gets used mainly during the summer months, we currently have a very very novice solar system setup and working but I feel it needs to be tweaked in order to run the appliances we'd like to when it's hot outside and we have the entire family visiting.
Currently we have 7 100ah 12v AGM batteries in parallel as our battery bank. (we were given these batteries as they came out of service at a local communications company, so I don't fully know the state of the batteries).
-200 watt solar panel ( about 5 years old now)
- cheapo 30amp charge controller
-1500watt modified sign wave inverter
The issues we seem to be constantly running into is that when we have a full cabin and it's ho outside we're running 4 x flood standing house fans, a couple usb style baby noise devices overnight and we're running the batteries down through the evening. This seems so odd to me since if I understand the battery setup we have 700 amp hrs or 8400 watt hrs of battery which should be more then enough no?
A couple things to also mention, when I woke up and saw that our bank was down to 11.6v I ran the generator all day with a 30amp ac to dc charger on the batteries and the charge controller never showed that it when into "float mode" does that indicate we might have bad batteries that aren't able to take on a full charge?
Things that we'd like to be able to run:
- Around 12 LED bulbs but never on all at once or on for very long right now.
- TV for the news in the morning (2 hrs) LED tv and satellite box
- A movie in the evening every now and then
- 4 or 5 fans when it's hot in the evenings
- 12v for the logic on our RV style propane fridge
- run the oven which has a glow plug that flips on and off to start the propane and regulate temperature. (pies are important okay!) haha
THANK YOU to your help!!
Mike
I have a small cabin on a lake that gets used mainly during the summer months, we currently have a very very novice solar system setup and working but I feel it needs to be tweaked in order to run the appliances we'd like to when it's hot outside and we have the entire family visiting.
Currently we have 7 100ah 12v AGM batteries in parallel as our battery bank. (we were given these batteries as they came out of service at a local communications company, so I don't fully know the state of the batteries).
-200 watt solar panel ( about 5 years old now)
- cheapo 30amp charge controller
-1500watt modified sign wave inverter
The issues we seem to be constantly running into is that when we have a full cabin and it's ho outside we're running 4 x flood standing house fans, a couple usb style baby noise devices overnight and we're running the batteries down through the evening. This seems so odd to me since if I understand the battery setup we have 700 amp hrs or 8400 watt hrs of battery which should be more then enough no?
A couple things to also mention, when I woke up and saw that our bank was down to 11.6v I ran the generator all day with a 30amp ac to dc charger on the batteries and the charge controller never showed that it when into "float mode" does that indicate we might have bad batteries that aren't able to take on a full charge?
Things that we'd like to be able to run:
- Around 12 LED bulbs but never on all at once or on for very long right now.
- TV for the news in the morning (2 hrs) LED tv and satellite box
- A movie in the evening every now and then
- 4 or 5 fans when it's hot in the evenings
- 12v for the logic on our RV style propane fridge
- run the oven which has a glow plug that flips on and off to start the propane and regulate temperature. (pies are important okay!) haha
THANK YOU to your help!!
Mike