Hi
AFter about 9 months I decided to tidy up my wiring. I have had two 110AH batteries sitting on a bench, with the turbine charge controler stuck on a tempory fitted shelf and the inverter along side the batteries. It seemed to all be working OK. 80Watts of solar and 200Watts of wind (when it blows from the right direction).
Last weekend I extended my shed, built a propper bench for the batteries, fitted a shelf to hold the Chinese grey box and inverter, and wired it all up neatly with the correct sized cables, metering, and the inverter on the ouput terminals on the charge controler. Flicked the switch when it was dark enough and watched the lights flick as the relay swopped from the grid.
I switched 196 Watts of lighting on to load it up and it all worked, left it running for half hour and then went back to check it. The low voltage alarm was bleeping on the inverter, clipped a meter onto the terminals on the inverter, 10.6 Volts, and the wiring from the batteries was warming up. put the meter on the batteries and 12.86 Volts. So I removed the inverter wiring from the charge controler output and connected directly to the battery leads. When I switched back on there was 12.6 Volts going into the inverter and the alarm was silent.
The charge controler works as it should to control the turbine, it switches to the dump load at the right time, but, it does not like doing what it is meant to do as far as stopping the batteries from being over discharged, fortunately the 600 Watt pure sine wave inverter I use has its own monitoring circuit and switches off at 10.5 Volts.
I am now fitting a pair of busbars from the batteries and everything will be wired from those. I can live with the fact the controler is not up to much but I did not like the fact the terminals and wiring was heating up. I think when funds allow a new controler is in order.
Brian
