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Message: <blockquote data-quote="scolairebocht" data-source="post: 141872" data-attributes="member: 8">4) Solar Charge Controller. While you can in theory wire up all these things together as is, the panel to the battery for example, this is generally not done (its sometimes done actually for car battery starting solar panels). What you do is connect all to this gadget and it regulates the power going around the system and provides you with some figures on it. This small cheap PWM controller is probably ok for this setup, a proper MPPT one would be better but a lot more expensive, and beware of advertised very cheap MPPT controllers, they are probably just lying and are really PWM.As you can see, the standard for connecting the devices to the controller is just a few millimetres of bare wire that you wire in like a plug. It will have six connectors, two for the solar panel or panels coming in, two for the battery or batteries (again these can be connected in series or parallel, with another great debate ensuing!), and two for any load that you are drawing off it (and frequently USB A slots that you can also use to draw power). Its two connectors because there are separate plus and minus wires in each case. You connect in the battery cables first, because these controllers do not have independent power, they need the battery connected to work at all. This means that you should connect the battery first because that way the safety mechanisms of the controller can kick in before you connect the panels.The various settings on the controller are easy enough to figure out, including:– the point where the controller will stop charging the battery in order not to over charge it, thats 14.4v on this setup for the sealed lead acid battery here;– the point where it will stop draining the battery and hence cut the load off, in order to protect the battery by not over taxing it, here thats set to 10.7v;– the point where it will start to drain the battery again if the load had been cut off earlier (it won’t do it at just 10.8v or whatever, because then it would cut in and cut out too quickly) and that's 12.6v for this battery;–  finally you have a setting where you can artificially cutoff the load at any point, you would do that if you weren’t using it and were worried that cables etc were drawing from the battery for no good reason.On this controller the main figure it gives is the current voltage of the battery, it doesn’t give great details on the power coming in from the panels, you just estimate that from the way the battery voltage increases and from the flashing panel symbol that will disappear if no power is coming in.Some of these inexpensive controllers also advertise the fact that they can be set for the different battery types, meaning the various type of lead acid or lithium or the new lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries, but actually that just changes the preset settings that I mentioned above and which can be manually set to new figures anyway.5) Sealed Lead Acid Battery. Possibly even more important than solar panels, are your battery or batteries. Here is just a small, but heavy, sealed lead acid battery of 12 volts and 9 amps. When you want to calculate the overall power that it can store, you usually multiply these figures to get the watts, so its a 108Wh battery. The connectors on this battery are not all that common, probably if you had a larger battery it will require ring terminals and you just wire the bare side of those into the solar controller battery terminals. Lead acid is old technology now (although obviously still used for cars, and yes those batteries are a possibility in this setup) and you would probably like to get a LiFePO4 battery, with hopefully more storage power, instead.6) This is a car style blade 15amp fuse, obviously designed to cut the system by blowing the fuse if it detects more than this current trying to run across it. It is advisable to add fuses and maybe switches into this kind of system, especially if it was bigger and carrying a larger current obviously. The reason is for obvious safety but also you don’t want the rest of your equipment to be destroyed if one battery or solar panel happens to go haywire and threatens to short circuit the system. This one came with the 12v socket below.7) 12 volt car cigarette lighter socket. You can get these with bare wires at the other end that you can wire in easily to the controller load terminals (which frequently have a light bulb symbol on them). They are very commonly used on DIY solar systems because they fit in well with 12v batteries, with no loss of power unlike when you use an inverter, and can then use the wide range of 12v devices that are made for cars using these sockets. You can get all kinds of electric appliances that way, from small vacuum cleaners to fridges to lights to electric blankets to fans etc etc, as well as obviously USB A and C ports that nearly everybody has in their cars now.8) An Inverter, that uses the 12v car lighter socket. Some car users will need to plug in a regular plug somewhere in their car, and hence there is a mass market for inverters to cater for car users this way. An inverter is simply a device that takes the Direct Current (DC) created by solar panels and batteries (including car batteries and their alternators) and converts it to the Alternating Current (AC) and higher voltage that is sent down by the grid and used in households. Hence with these devices you can plug in an appliance that has a regular household plug on it. Because of the number of cars out there you will find that the cheapest inverters you can get are these, the ones that connect to the 12v car cigarette style socket.However, inverters like this come with many caveats, realistically you cannot expect miracles from an 8 euro inverter or from the small power that this system generates, don’t bother plugging your hoover or fridge into it! But nonetheless one of the main sockets works perfectly smoothly with this writer’s laptop, and the inbuilt USB C plugs have also successfully provided fast charging for the mobile phone. Larger more serious systems would include an inverter for c.€100 and it would be attached by ring terminals directly to the battery.So hopefully some might find this interesting, as a kind of summer feature on Sarsfields!by Brian Nugent, <a href="http://www.orwellianireland.com" target="_blank">http://www.orwellianireland.com</a>FootnoteThe approximately €130 amount for the DIY setup comes from (following the numbering above): 1) €64; 2) a 2 metre MC4 cable extension €11; 3) €7; 4) c.€10, its circa because it came with a small kit, including a 30W panel, that cost €16; 5) €23 secondhand, but its not much more new; 6) included in (7); 7) €4.60; 8) €8.45 euro.</blockquote>

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