Solar taking forever to charge batteries, power disappearing

[jimindenver]

Dune

I apologize if my post upset you. I was trying to get bardo to call the maker of his MPPT controller, not you. My hope is the they can explain the way it works better than I so that we do not continue to have the same discussion every time a solar question comes up. It confuses the people we are trying to help and side tracks the threads.

 

[DuneElliot]

Dune

I apologize if my post upset you. I was trying to get bardo to call the maker of his MPPT controller, not you. My hope is the they can explain the way it works better than I so that we do not continue to have the same discussion every time a solar question comes up. It confuses the people we are trying to help and side tracks the threads.

No worries. Like I said I thought you were talking to me and I couldn't figure out why I had riled up your ire!! All is good in CRVL world.

Apparently I understand more than I thought if even I know why a controller is needed

 

[deadwood]

Dune. I've only had my solar set up for a about six months so far. I am not an expert by any means but have learned more then I thought I ever would over the last year or so. Two things that have come up in my system so far that I have had to tweak a little. Not sure if it will apply to your setup or not.

First. When I was setting up my charge controller it has a setting for AGM batteries which is what I have. I have a fullriver 260ah battery. The AGM settings for my charge controller would only give a max charge voltage of 14.4 volts. When I go onto the fullriver web site to check the specs for my specific battery it says to charge at 14.7 volts. The float charge from my controller was too low as well. What I did was to look at what all the different settings on my charge controller were set to and pick the one that matched my battery. I have a morningstar MPPT controller and the setting that matched almost perfectly was for flooded lead acid batteries. It seemed weird to go with that setting because I have AGM's but this was the only way to get the volts into the battery that Fullriver says they need.

Second thing that has happened. I have the Trimetric battery monitor as well but have had a few glitches that I can't figure out. It seems to work perfectly then sometimes I will check it and it will say something like my batter percentage is 125% full. Or it will show that I am pulling 16 amps out of the battery when I know nothing is even turned on. I have a battery switch between the battery and and everything else to be able to isolate it. So far if I turn it off so that no power is being read then when I turn the battery switch back on the Trimetric comes back on and gives the correct readings.

My only real advice out of all of this is to try rule out as many things as you can. Reset the Trimetric if you can. Maybe reset the controller if you have a way to isolate it from the panels. Turn off the inverter for a day and see if that was causing it. I would even be checking every connection just to make sure I don't have a loose connection somewhere. From reading your original post it sounds like you have a pretty solid system but that something is not working correctly somewhere or it is working but you are getting the wrong readings. Nothing more frustrating then trying to track down an electrical problem. At least for a non expert like me.

I've kind of waited a while to post on this thread because there are many more much more knowledgeable then me on this subject. But I'll keep following the thread until I find out how it ends and what was causing the issue in the first place.

 

[DuneElliot]

I think I have things mostly figured out, at least according to Renogy...changed the parameters to what things should be charged at. Will keep an eye on it. It was also suggested that I would be better running all my panels in series vs series parallel. I only didn't go this route because of possible shading issues. I'll try what I have for a few days and then try changing the panels around to just series and see what difference it makes.

The advice here has been good I just struggle when it sounds Russian...can't look up every third word tryibg to understand something as it just gets frustrating