Hey All,
I'm slowly putting together my "control board" which will house the main components of the system; charge controller, inverter, battery hookup and solar hookup... It's hard to say what the system will "become" but right now I'm building around my MPPT controller which is a SolarEpic Tracer4215BN which allows for 40A in and 20A out. I'm designing a 24V 1.2Kw array and battery bank. Based on my reading on wire sizing so far, it sounds like it's hard to, if not impossible to use wire that is too thick. Is this true?
I recently bought a used vehicle that had a hard wired inverter run from the battery. I don't have a need for it so I pulled it out and with it came about 12ft of stranded 4AWG wire. The wire is in good shape so I'm considering using it to tie together my components. Based on some number crunching I could get away with 8AWG for this system so I'd be oversizing the wire a bit here. My gut feeling says this is cool but I don't know for sure.
Are there any pitfalls for using oversized wire?
Side question.
When connecting this wire to the charge controller do I just stuff the raw stranded wire in the screw terminal? Seems dangerous. Tin the end? Or is there some kind of end crimp on end connector for this kind of application?
Thanks!
Rich
I'm slowly putting together my "control board" which will house the main components of the system; charge controller, inverter, battery hookup and solar hookup... It's hard to say what the system will "become" but right now I'm building around my MPPT controller which is a SolarEpic Tracer4215BN which allows for 40A in and 20A out. I'm designing a 24V 1.2Kw array and battery bank. Based on my reading on wire sizing so far, it sounds like it's hard to, if not impossible to use wire that is too thick. Is this true?
I recently bought a used vehicle that had a hard wired inverter run from the battery. I don't have a need for it so I pulled it out and with it came about 12ft of stranded 4AWG wire. The wire is in good shape so I'm considering using it to tie together my components. Based on some number crunching I could get away with 8AWG for this system so I'd be oversizing the wire a bit here. My gut feeling says this is cool but I don't know for sure.
Are there any pitfalls for using oversized wire?
Side question.
When connecting this wire to the charge controller do I just stuff the raw stranded wire in the screw terminal? Seems dangerous. Tin the end? Or is there some kind of end crimp on end connector for this kind of application?
Thanks!
Rich
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