Ok,
I am planning on taking a week or so off this December.
I have a small array...
- x deep cycle batts...
- x Siemens 48's.
So far, my max charge has be a bit under 20 Amps hrs a day, with generally less than 4 amps max in the early afternoon. Still hoping it will be better next summer.
I believe that I am running around 70% - 80% charged on the batteries, but it is hard to say for sure because of the big plateau in the charging curve.
So... here is the dilema.
My charge controller seems to draw 3-5 watts off of the batteries, and seems to be incapable of running off of solar power only. I really don't like that aspect of it.
What happens if I get a foot of snow (or an inch of freezing rain, or a combination of the two) with the panels plugged into the charge controller. Hopefully it would sluff of in a couple of days... But, there would be the risk of running the charge controller for a week while generating ZERO POWER, and slowly draining my battery array. Probably not enough to be critical... but certainly enough to be frustrated coming home to a dead array that could take a month to recover at my rate of charging. It wouldn't be a good scene.
I could split off a smaller array of panels... say 1, 2, or 4 panels which should effectively give me trickle charging around 1-2 amps max distributed over 4 batteries..... Probably hard to over charge them on that. A diode, of course, would protect me from discharging, and I would hopefully come home to a 100% charged array. And, there wouldn't be a worry about snow.
I guess the last option is to throw the isolator switch on the battery array, and basically do nothing while I'm on vacation.
What are other's thoughts?
Thanks,
Cliff