Vigo
Solar Addict
Well, it doesn't feel right because.. well it's not wrong, but it's only right by accident! Because the controller can only auto-detect the nominal system voltage, but i dont think any controller can truly auto-identify the battery type/chemistry.I spoke with support. And I asked about the "USE" icon. According to them, the controller is able to autodetect. But they said I need to click on it to have the controller autodetect. I know they are Renogy's support staff, but something doesn't feel right about this.
Ultimately, I selected the icon that said "FLA", which I guessed is "Flooded Lead Acid".
And when I connected everything, it worked great!
Despite them giving you unclear or downright wrong information about how to set the controller, FLA is correct for what you're doing in this case.
About the only thing you might want to look into, is the default equalization settings. They might be too aggressive or too frequent to leave at default settings. But everything about EQ depends on the rest of the setup.
For one thing you can't equalize off solar unless you have enough power to raise the battery to that voltage for a fairly long time to begin with. But if you DO have that much solar, is that, minus the load you will be trying to run at the same time, still enough to equalize the battery? Because if it is, you are probably returning the battery to ~100% SOC on a daily basis anyway, in which case you would not need to equalize very often at all! Every 3 months maybe? This is a similar scenario to car batteries which don't get equalized AT ALL and last for years.
But if you don't have enough solar to power the load AND bring the battery to 100% on most days and go enough beyond that to achieve 'equalization' levels of wattage into the battery for a sufficient amount of time, then: You will need to equalize more often, AND you'll need to hook up a 2nd power source to do it, in which case it's going to be a manual process anyway and the EQ timers/settings in the controller practically don't matter anyway and you'd be better off setting a reminder in your phone calendar! So, it depends.. ?
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