[QUOTE=RussN9ZP;48294]My set up will consist of my battery bank set up outside my HAM radio shack. From the battery bank to the inside i am going to run 4 gauge wires(10ft run) to buss bars inside the shack. Now what i wanted to do was run the charge leads from the charge controller to the buss bar which the 4
Theoretically, since the Charge Controller is sensing the battery voltage to regulate its output, you should connect as directly as possible to the terminal of the battery. In practice, depending on how large your bus bar is and whether there are any interconnections along it that will develop a significant voltage drop, you might not need to do this.
There are two different scenarios that have to be taken into account:
1. When there is no load and you are charging the batteries at full current, what will the voltage difference be between the charge controller terminals and the battery terminals? A large (.1 or .2 volt) voltage drop along the way will result in the battery being undercharged.
2. When there is load and you are also getting output from the charger, will the current being drawn from the battery, through the busbar, cause the voltage seen by the charge controller to be less than the battery voltage, causing the CC to output more current than it otherwise would for the battery voltage? Easy to dispose of that one: if current is being drawn from the battery, that means the charger is unable to keep up with the load and is supplying some of the load current with nothing left for the battery. That will not hurt the battery at all and will get maximum output from the CC.
And since I mentioned two scenarios here is the third: Filtering.
The waveform output of the CC may be messy. If you connect directly to your bus bar, most or all of that noise will be on the bus. If you connect directly to the battery terminals, some of that noise will be filtered by the low impedance of the battery before reaching the bus.
As a practical matter, you will want to put RF and maybe audio filtering at the output terminals of the CC anyway (depending on how well it is filtered already.)
OK, looking at it again, I see that you may be talking about the bus bar which joins your parallel-connected batteries. That is another issue. You do not want to run separate wires from the CC to each battery. But you do want to equalize as much as possible the resistance from the attachment point on that bus bar to the different batteries. There is a good reference to charging parallel batteries in one of the sticky threads at the top of the off-grid forum.
It is post # 2 here: http://www.solarpaneltalk.com/showth...p-Why-Tutorial
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Connecting the charge controller
My set up will consist of my battery bank set up outside my HAM radio shack. From the battery bank to the inside i am going to run 4 gauge wires(10ft run) to buss bars inside the shack. Now what i wanted to do was run the charge leads from the charge controller to the buss bar which the 4 gauge main wires are attached to. Would this be ok or do i need to run separate wires from the charge controller directly to the batteries?
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