diy solar

diy solar

Improving Contact Area on Welded Stud Pads

Do a full current test for forty to sixty minutes and probe with a laser thermometer. Even the $25 one from HF works pretty good.
Very revealing.
My hotspots were…
The inverter housing 103
After the inverter anl fuse 80
Top of bms 80
Main battery pos bus post 78
Everything else was ambient ~68

At least you’ll know for sure. You never know, you might find a heater.
 
Jim, I SWAG the Docan supplied shrink-wrapped PAIRS to each have a cross-section roughly equivalent to round wire size smaller than AWG-6, perhaps approaching just AWG-8. My SWAG for ampacity is around 50A, far short of the 120A+ average current I will need to pull from the battery while running the RV air conditioner with the compressor on. (The rest of the Inverter input amps will come from two other battery packs).
 
It's just general rule of mine to reduce the number of contact surfaces as much as possible.
The bulk of the current to the attached terminal connection will be up thru the bus bars since the stainless steel stud and nut will have more resistance than the aluminum face of the battery terminal and the copper bus bar.
Exactly. The flimsy Docan-supplied pairs will generally receive and send current from the upper side of the "main" bus bar ends, and only when the resistance of going through 4 layers of thin electroplate (for the lower Docan, it's 8 layers for the "upper") PLUS the resistance along the length of a thin Docan bar, is less or equal to the resistance of staying entirely within the big "main bar". I don't feel that the Docan path will sufficiently "attractive" until the main bar has been loaded by more than about 130A.
 
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