I believe my last post on our solar power suggested things were not going well with the batteries. Well, I’m happy to report a turnaround.
When I got concerned about the way I wired the batteries together and rewired them, I created trouble. I switched the battery wiring to a spider or wheel style and ended up with seven fat battery cables all held together with a single bolt. At the time I was concerned about the quality of the connection, but they were all touching and the bolt was tight — really tight. I hoped it was fine.
Over time, things continued to get worse. I worried the connection was not solid and finally found this beauty on line:
This is how we do it now
Ideally, it would have seven connectors and not five, but this is what I found. It, however, is working great. The batteries have all bounced back. When the sun goes down the initial voltage is higher than I’ve seen in a great while: 50.5-ish. The voltage remains high for much longer too. It’s frequently still above 50 volts late into the night. There was a time when the voltage dropped to 49.1-ish as soon as the sun set. Further evidence of improvement was a day with virtually no sun — we powered through the day and on until the next without concern — or skimping.
It’s such an improvement that I’ve set the generator into maintenance mode in order to make sure it runs once in awhile.
A nice convenience with this battery connector is the wiring block at the top. You can pull off 48 volts for DC powered things here — I’m not using it, but I would have if I’d bought it when I installed the system.