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Hello, I've been purchasing some solar equipment with the hope of going away from the generator at our cottage. I have 4x 125 watt Sharp panels, 8 Surrette 530 batteries (3 years old), Tri-Star 45 mppt charge controller, xantrex 1512 inverter. When asking for advice, I've heard that the batteries I have will not be charged enough by the panels that I currently have. I also heard that the panels should have enough power to keep the batteries charged. The cottage will be used 2-3 days per week with 4-5 days of recharge time in between, but I may be skipping weeks out at the cottage.Power will be supplemented with champion 2000 watt inverter generator or 2600 watt Yamaha generator. Please let me know what you think.
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So it looks like you are running a 12 Volt system and you have 4 strings of 2 ea 6v batteries. Each string is 400 Amp hours based on what I'm seeing on the Net about those batteries, so you have around 1600 amp hours total storage (19,200 watt hours). That's quite a bit of storage with only 500 watts maximum panel input. You MAY be OK, but it really depends on how much power you will actually use each day that you are there. Theoretically (before considering losses throughout the system), it would take around 40 sunlight hours to recharge that bank if it was completely depleted, which you don't want to do. So if you only use half of the battery charge it would take about 20 hours of good sun (maybe something like 5 days of good sun to charge the bank from half, depending on where you are located). That may be OK for you, but seems to be pushing it too much for my comfort.
The problem is, you probably can't add any more panels to your charge controller if you must stay with a 12 V battery bank. To add more panels you would need to get another charge controller, or convert to a 24 V battery system (which would then require you to get a 24V inverter and anything else that you must convert to 24V). -
Your panels can only support 2 of those batteries. If you can't put more panels or don't want to get rid off some of the batteries, since you have a 2000 watts generator. Run the generator for 2 to 3 hours on the second day when you are there to charge these battery with a battery charger to stir up the electrolyte. you have some major problem to keep these batteries balance if you use 12 volts bank. you might have to charge the batteries two strings at a time.Comment
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Yes if you want to charge them separately. you need to disconnect each string.Comment
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