Set-up and performance

[Wade Mc]

OK lets start over. You said you have 2400 watts of panels on a 24 volt 1600 AH battery, and cannot get to an acceptable end charge voltage right?

Fist thing I can tell you right away you do not have enough panel wattage for the batteries. You want at least a C/10 charge rate on a 1600 AH battery with a 20 hours discharge rate. I assume you have an 80 amp MPPT controller and at 2400 watts on a 24 volt battery will get you only 80 amps of charge current. But you need 160 amps, and with these short winter days only get at best 3 to 4 Sun hours if you live in the south. Up north way less.

Your batteries are in desperate need of an EQ Charge and yesterday was too late. Get you a 200 amp battery rectifier with adjustable voltage output the kind Telecom uses. Fuel up the generator for 24 hours of fuel. Set the output voltage to 28.2 volts and charge until current tapers down and is constant without dropping for 3 hours with no load current flowing. All this is covered in the manual

Also refer to the manual for CYCLE SERVICE charging. If discharging more than 5% in a daily cycle, you set daily charge for 2.38 volts per cell (28.5 volts) and charge until the sun goes down and pray it was long enough. There is no Bulk or Absorb stages with this battery. Only Float and EQ. Float voltage is set by daily DOD percentage. Read the manual section 12 (Cycle Service) closely many times until you fully understand it. Then read section 13 (Equalizing) many times until you understand it. Once you do that you will understand what is wrong.

What you will discover is you are in Deficit Charging. Batteries are not like money, there is no credit or debt forgiveness. Get behind, you destroy the batteries and get to buy new ones. No exceptions. Hopefully you have caught this in time. Be prepared to run the generator a lot. Right now until you get a handle on daily watt hour usage, I think your panel wattage is like peeing on a forest fire with these batteries. You will not know that unless you know your daily watt hour usage and Sun Hours. There can only be one of two things. Either your panel wattage is way to low, or your batteries are way over sized.

A properly sized system is designed so the panels can resupply your daily usage under worse case conditions which means winter Sun Hours in most cases. Batteries are sized to have 5 day reserve capacity. Inverter usually no larger than panel wattage or less. Generator sized to recharge in 8 hours plus carry your load. AC charger to provide 8 hour charge rate.

This is great information. I would love to put up a second array!!, but the jnstaller said the system would not handle anymore panels. These batteries are 6 volts 1100 amp/hrs, having 12 of these should I not have 3300 amp/hrs total? You are correct 80 amp max in good sun, and having We can go 10-14 days with no sun here, and the panels will only take 300-500 watts through each day. I normally run the generator for 1/2 to 1 hr before going to work in the morning, and when I get home I run it for 2 hrs each night on bad days. I have been trying hard to replace what I use each day. When we do laundry and have showers we run the generator regardless. The pump and machines draw too much power. Another big mistake I made is not getting an auto-start generator to work with the charge controller. Thinking of doing this at some point. I will learn all of what you mentioned, and respond. Thank you so much for your time and information!!!

[Sunking]

This is great information. The jnstaller said the system would not handle anymore panels.

Your installer is an idiot. He is correct your charge controller input power limit is 2400 watts on a 24 volt battery. On a 48 volt battery the limit is 4800 watts. He is an idiot for not knowing a C/20 charge current is only half way there to C/10.

Read this and you should get a rough idea of what I am talking about. In fact read all the Stickies written by me in the Off-Grid topic and you should have a pretty good idea of what is going on and figuring out where you stand.