I think I just ruined my Eppever 60 watt charge controller.

[Nursekatrina]

Hello all. I’m a nurse up in Northern California. Been in a self converted, 1998, 15 passenger van. I have one 200 watt solar panel on my roof, a 2000 watt inverter, 60 watt epever mppt controller, a fuse box, and two fuses. I had a cheap mppt controller and a cheap 12 volt, 100 ah lead acid battery that I picked up from Home Depot. Everything worked great for about two weeks. Then the battery wouldn’t charge. After research I found out it was my cheap 24 dollars charge controller. So I saved up and bought the epever and two, 110 watt yellow top optima batteries. I hooked them up in parallel and sparks flew! Charge controller is now off and everything is dead  :huh: 
I am so sad as I sit in my hospital parking lot still having no power. 
Any help would be greatly appreciated. The same set up worked great for two weeks. I just added the epever and the two optima batteries.

 

[jonyjoe303]

Double check all the connections. You might have reversed the plus / neg. If you have another 12 volt battery you might want to connect to the batt out of the epever to see if it still works.

According to the epever manual the controller is protected from connecting the PV or battery in reverse. It says to just disconnect and make sure and connect correctly. Maybe you just blew some fuses. One thing to doublecheck is your optima batteries and make sure they are connected properly in parallel.

If you can take a picture of the battery connections and post it here.

 

[bullfrog]

Hopefully it was dark outside or you had the panel covered when you disconnected the batteries as I believe the panel should be the first thing disconnected from the controller and the last thing reconnected to the controller when changing batteries. So positive battery terminal to positive battery terminal to positive battery terminal on the controller and negative battery terminal to negative battery terminal to negative battery terminal on the controller with the positive from one battery and the negative from the other battery going to the controller.

 

[Qxxx]

Katrina, from what I can tell those batteries are 55AH each which gives you a total of 110AH, not watts (???). Do one thing at a time.

1. disconnect all wiring.

2. check the voltages of the batteries separately, if you don't have a voltmeter you can buy one at Harbor Freight or Home Depot for $10 or less. They should read about the same, 12.5-13.5V range.

3. hook up only one battery to the charge controller. The controller should power up and hopefully look like it's working ok from the indicators.

4. lastly hook the solar panel to the controller and see if the battery is being charged. Leave the 2nd battery disconnected and see how charging goes.

Double check proper polarities at each step. We also need to know what wires you were using to connect the batteries in parallel. Hopefully the wires are red and black, and not just all black.