So, I did an impulse buy the other day and bought a charge controller. I was the only bidder and got this for $8.11 shipped from the US. How can you make money like that? Lightning took out the one in the garage and figured this was more than adequate. Two days later it arrived and I figured let's put it in the power shed to take care of those couple 12V panels I still have. I tore my microprocessor PWM I built out and mounted this.
First the display reading the battery voltage was .3V off.
Next the battery voltage started climbing over 15V. Turns out the negative terminal of the panel floats. It is switched to common neg by a FET. Somewhere one of my panels is tied to ground in the wiring under the house. Not having a common negative prevents me from reading the panel voltage and turning on the secondary meter loads.
Maybe I can use the switched lighting output to do this. There aren't a lot of time options. And this output has a switched negative too. Not going to power a relay all night.
Low voltage cut off is adjustable, but range is way too low. Same thing with the reset voltage, too low for me. This is worthless to me.
For shed lighting It is not a bad unit for the price, but it is just too hard to implement in my system.
