Helpful Solar link

[BradKW]

I'm afraid that electrical just seems to be one of my weaknesses. Sometimes I really must read the same thing, put 3 different ways, before I grasp a basic concept when it comes to volts, amps, wats, float, etc. Anyway, I found a site that's helped a few light bulbs go on for me...and more importantly, it feels like they might stay on 

Here's an excerpt:

"While I’d like to keep this simple, there are a few basics that you must understand in order to make your system work.  Here is my version of how DC (direct current) electricity works.  On one hand we have air pressure; on the other hand electricity.  If you want to air up a truck tire you force a volume of air (cubic feet) into it with pounds per square inch (pressure) of air until it is full.  It is easy to get the first few cubic feet of air in; you can even do it with a hand pump.  The fuller it gets though, the more pressure you need.  You can’t get it up to 80 pounds unless your hose puts out more pressure than that.  An air hose with 75 pounds of pressure in it will never fill a tire to 80 pounds.  Batteries are not sponges that soak up amps.  They are a lot more like tires that need to be filled up with air pressure.  You need volts (pressure) to get the amps (volume) to go into the battery.  Unless you have enough volts to push the amps into the battery, they just won’t go in.  Batteries self regulate the amps they will accept depending on level of charge and voltage.  The amps going in will drop as the battery fills, and if the voltage is not high enough the battery will not be charged all the way up before the amps taper off.   Trying to charge a battery with too few volts is just like trying to air up a tire with too few pounds of pressure.  It just doesn’t get the battery all the way full.  Just like you can use the volume of air that comes out of an air hose to do work, like run an air wrench, you can use the amps in a battery to run electrical appliances.  An amp hour is a way of defining power available or used.  It is like volume over time.  If you want to run an appliance it will take whatever number of amps for the period of time it runs and by combining the two (amp hours), you get a way of defining the power you need to store in a battery if you want to run that appliance at a later time.  Watts (volts times amps) is actually a more accurate way of defining energy, which is why the power companies bill you for watts or kilowatts, but it is much easier for us to deal with this issue in a battery powered world by using amps times hours and assuming an average of 12 volts, even though a healthy 12 volt system is never really that low."

https://handybobsolar.wordpress.com/the-rv-battery-charging-puzzle-2/

 

[WriterMs]

I can remember reading Bob's book a couple of years ago and thinking that I understood the basics of a simple system. These days, I read some of the conversations on solar and they get so technical that I feel lost again.

Since I do not anticipate adding solar for a good while, I've decided to absorb what I can. Then when I am ready to have solar, I'll review Bob's basics and a few threads here. LOL

 

[Canine]

Understanding what I read about ac and dc electricity and solar technicalities for me is like the myth that solar works well as soon as the sun comes up and till it goes down, in other words, the myth is easy to believe but in practicality, you only get good results from flat mounted panels for about 4-5 hours a day (like 10-3) and the rest is marginal. I "absorb" about half of what I read, then the "line loss" and cranial inverter reduce the available information down to "float" in my small grey cell compartment... That why Bobs information is helpful.

On some other thread purists were knocking what he was saying but they are so far past me on hair splitting that I dont care. "RV Solar and DC electricity for Dummies" is what I need. That link is a good start.