My inverter is a modified sine wave inverter. I can pick up a cheap pure sign wave inverter but the cost, watt for watt is about 40 percent more. More expensive if I want the super whamydyne units.
Nice!!! That will put my podunk frame to shame. I should be running over to Home depot soon to pick up the lumber, but mine will be....basic in operation. I see the hinges you talked about. Now I will probably use a single hinged mid mounted board to allow for tilt. I have enough space and wire so that all we have to do is simply lift the panel mount and rotate it 180 degrees to face either the morning or afternoon sun. I am fortunate to have a location that gets both morning and afternoon sun, the house nor the fences get in the way, the location gets a good solar track.
Disconnecting the controllers from the battery and effectively shutting them off while sitting connected to open circuit solar panels isn't the most ideal approach to safely disconnect. This leaves your solar charge controller sitting, powered off, with (potentially) live high voltage feeds into them. I've seen it warned of many times throughout this forum. I think the primary reason being that you could fry your charge controller like this. There are probably other reasons. Anyway, maybe a relay on the panels to the controller for both hvd and lvd disconnect. Obviously, on LVD you would still have to disconnect the SCC; unless, you can simply turn the load switch off programatically on the scc (if that is indeed how you're using it).
I hauled all that in my Nissan Versa with room to spare ?
My pickup retired when I did. It deserved it after hauling far too many BFRs
FORD - Fast Oversized Rock Delivery
I do tend to overbuild. But I wanted to make sure it didn't blow away.
The frame is a bit high to allow for snow. The panels will sit about 1.5 feet above ground level.
That is way above my pay grade. I will try to learn a bit from this side bar thread.
Chances are the load that is being put on the new super whamadyne is just not enough to bring it below the float voltage range. Which I think is a good thing. I start out the night at 13.1 volts and in the morning the voltage dropped down 13.0 with her running the electric heating pad all night. Could also be that my old battery while the same model number as the new took a few beat downs due to my testing on it and trying to figure things out. Who knows but I do know that I have power to spare and it's all automatic. To coin a phrase...Winter is coming and there will be the real challenge. The heating pad is great for her but eventually I will have to bring electric heaters into the mix even if it is to just turn them on long enough to break the chill in the house but hey, if it does drain the batteries down, as soon as they hit 12.3 volts it switches over to grid power that effectively maximizes the amount of power I can harvest from the sun and use at night. I will post a pic of the final panel mount, my son has come up with a couple of good ideas for tilting the panels, although my podunk ass seems happy to just use a tilt board. In the rare wind storm I will just lay the panels flat. I do have a weather station up and running so in theory I should be able to see a problem before it becomes one.
Thank you, I will just live with it because at the end of the day, I still transfer over to grid once the voltage drops below 12.3 volts, but if it never transfers over to grid then who am I to complain? I more curious about why and your answer pretty much clocks it.
You can go lower than that without much effect - as long as they get volt-punched hard regularly and don’t go low on electrolyte they (lead acid) will or should last pretty good
How about dragging it down so low that the inverter screams and turns off? I mean when I curb stomp a battery, I don't half step. Still, I am loving the added battery and panel. Come winter I am really going to put the system to the test. But for the moment I am enjoying historically low energy cost at home. I should screen shot my utility usage.
Sarcasm accepted
Now that I have the transfer switch running, the problem with batteries going Chernobyl is all but gone. I will need to come up with a way to use more than a heating pad. The heating pad is great for the wife because it's August and while Monterey still gets cold at night here, when winter comes we may still have comparably mild weather, rarely reaching 32 degrees (0 C) it will get cold enough that I will have to come up with heating solution to at least make the living parts of the house comfortable. But looking at the utility usage, I am still better off heating wherever I need the heat rather than depending on a central heating system that heats the whole house whether there are people there or not. Thanks for taking my humorous snarks with a grain of salt. September is the hottest month of the year here so I still have time to figure things out If you look at the averages here, the challenge is not out of reach:Sarcasm accepted
That is one way to need to replace your lead acid batteries every year!
I haven’t had my inverter go off on overload/low voltage since I replaced the 9-year-old batteries with new ones.
