Charge controller to RV power center?

[vagari]

I ran into someone who had the solar panels on the roof of his RV connected to the charge controller then to his RV's power center. I've always seen the charge controller connected directly to the batteries. At least that's how I did it. He said his RV power center had two positive inputs. The batteries were connected to one and the other was open. So he connected his charge controller to the open input instead of his batteries. He said it's worked for like two years. Is this OK to do this? Any drawbacks? I've really never seen this done.

 

[blars]

As long as the total voltage drop from the charge controller to the battery is low enough, it's fine. (Many RVs are wired with undersized wire, so it may not be OK.) The voltage sense leads from the charge controller need to go directly to the battery. (If your charge controller does not have external voltage sense, you need to be more concerned with voltage drop.) Some paranoid marine installations have separate charge and discharge busses, only connected together at the battery, with over voltage disconnect between the charge bus and the battery and under voltage between the battery and load.

 

[John61CT]

Best practice is for charge sources to go direct to the bank used the most.

An Alt VR with voltage sense perhaps more critical, obviously also temp-sensing.

The smaller outputs of solar, perhaps just a question of efficiencies, wire sizes etc, but if doing temp compensation. . .

 

[Michael4104]

This is what I have done with my 30 amp solar controller. I wired the solar controller to the batteries, than I wired the controller to the solar panels. Next I removed the wire from the batteries going to the RV power center. I replaced that wire with a wire coming from the solar controllers load circuit. This protects the batteries from over/under discharge.
Please note. This load circuit will not support most inverters of any size, just the small ones.