They are 600ah/100h or 424ah/c10. I am only drawing a maximum of 200w through the night.
Urgent help please
- Thread starter Emm
- Start date
Yes
As soon as the sun goes down they are dropping fast to 43v and by mid evening everything is shut down.
Bluedog225
Texas
- Joined
- Nov 18, 2019
- Messages
- 3,067
Post 16?
You live in Tenerife? Off the coast of Africa? Sounds very cool. Pics of your area would be great.
On your system. This group does best with lots of pics. Panels, charge controller, batteries, inverter, cables. And details on each one (brand, age, capacity, etc.).
Regarding the pic you posted of your panels, it would be good to keep the grass down. Any shade can cause an issue with charging.
Until you get this sorted out, I’d quit discharging your batteries so low at night.
And welcome to the forum. Hope you stick around.
You live in Tenerife? Off the coast of Africa? Sounds very cool. Pics of your area would be great.
On your system. This group does best with lots of pics. Panels, charge controller, batteries, inverter, cables. And details on each one (brand, age, capacity, etc.).
Regarding the pic you posted of your panels, it would be good to keep the grass down. Any shade can cause an issue with charging.
Until you get this sorted out, I’d quit discharging your batteries so low at night.
And welcome to the forum. Hope you stick around.
I would guess that your solar array charges the batteries too quickly during the day and than spends the rest of the time idle. Or perhaps at too high of amperage charge. Note that simply reading the voltage of a battery does not give you any idea of it capacity. For this a battery needs to be load tested.
I posted before...you just mean of the set up right?
Post 16? Not sure what that means? Am I answering incorrectly ? new to forums. Yes I live in Tenerife up in the mountains. I have an animal sanctuary that is driving me into the ground!. It's beautiful and green up here at the moment because we have had tons of rain but it's usually dry and dead. I will post some pictures.
I did post pictures of the details in the original post. Do you need more? That's all I have, panels an inverter and batteries. Nothing else. The charge controller is combined in the inverter I believe. Not the best quality system I know but all I could get at the time and I was just so excited to have electricity for the first time in years!
Yes! By 10am they are "fully charged" according to the inverter. I posted a picture of the charge settings I have just tried to change them. Obviously I know that the cut off voltage is too low.
Bluedog225
Texas
- Joined
- Nov 18, 2019
- Messages
- 3,067
i was just saying that you did post pics in number 16.
TomC4306
Solar Obsessive
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Last edited:
That indicates your batteries have very little capacity. So your initial analysis of the batteries being bad is a valid one.
Now why did they go bad? Perhaps the charge profile was wrong, perhaps you discharged them too deeply too often. (lead acid batteries should only be cycled down to 50% capacity) or perhaps you had a bad battery that dragged all the other batteries down with it (it takes just one rotten apple to destroy the whole barrel).
So at this point you need to budget to get replacement batteries. Avoid people trying to sell you all kinds of magic to fix things that are not a problem.
Q-Dog
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The new settings are better matched to your battery specs. Maybe try them for a couple of days and see if the batteries recover any capacity. But the batteries may need to be replaced after being undercharged for so long. Also, what are the equalization settings? I don't know a lot about what settings they need or even if GEL batteries need equalization.
