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It's not intuitively obvious to me why that would be. Can you explain? I'm not challenging the assertion, I'm just dumb. :)

As someone else pointed out, a voltage drop calculator is your friend. Since you have an MPPT charge controller, voltage drop from the panel to the charge controller matters more than with a PWM controller, at least in theory. 10 gauge is fine. For ~6 amps & a one-foot length between the...

Maybe I missed it, but how did they get 15A into a 50Ah battery bank that was at >80% SOC?

I know you said you want to keep it cheap, but get something like this to monitor your Aux battery & solar charging. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017BDQHE6/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Mount the shunt right at the battery. Or replace your charge controller with a EPsolar...

We'd need more information to diagnose the issues, but here are some thoughts: Your profile says you're from the LA area, so having the panels mounted flat, facing up shouldn't be too much of an issue in the summer, but the rest of the year, your panels' max output is reduced if you don't tilt...

Reviewmeta.com is a great site to help weed out the "shill" reviews from the legit ones. You just paste the URL for the Amazon product into their engine and in a minute or so you get an analysis of the reviews. They also have a browser plug-in that speeds up the process a bit. I'm pretty good at...

Thanks, guys. I guess the only way to know for sure how significant the inrush current is is to buy the high-current charger and try it with my genny. This leads me to questions about generator sizing and charger sizing, but I'll post them on a new thread since they are heading off topic...

The Iota DLS-90 battery charger specs list a maximum single-cycle inrush current of 40A @ 108V. To what extent do I need to consider the max charger inrush current when choosing the output current capability of the generator that will power the charger? Is a 1/60s brownout going to bring a...

https://www.pure-gas.org/about

Avoid that Allpowers charge controller like the plague. They frequently don't work (mine never left float mode,) and customer service is somewhere between obnoxious and terrible. This one, one the other hand, works well and is still cheap compared to an MPPT controller that works well.

Look for SterlingTek camera battery chargers on Amazon...many of them come with 12V plugs in addition to AC. I've owned a few of them, and while they don't look and feel like something high quality, they've always worked perfectly for me, i.e. never fried a battery, and I get the same number of...

The Liitokala Smart battery Charger charges at up to 2A, depending on mode. It's hard to tell whether that is per cell, or total- since only one slot is capable of 2A, I assume that the maximum rate for the charger, not per cell. The internet consensus (for what that's worth) seems to be that...

Here's another AA/AAA option that works well on AC or 12V. I've had one for 10 years at least; I carry it in my big camera bag and when I go camping, and it hasn't broken. It's very lightweight, and doesn't have the tendency to overheat the batteries like other cheap chargers I've used. I check...

Thanks, good info! Makes sense.

Thanks for confirming what I thought was the case- sometimes it's hard to filter through the ambiguous & often misleading marketing hype around battery chargers. From a battery chemistry standpoint, do you know why the periodic cycling through bulk/absorb is necessary? If the battery is...

I always appreciate a tip on a good bargain, but there are so many red flags on this one, I don't even know where to start...

I have a 12V bank of Trojan T105s that only gets used sporadically. I'd like to use the Victron charge controller that currently sits on it with a more portable AGM battery, and put the Trojan bank on a trickle charger when I'm not using it. According to Trojan, maximum self-discharge for an...

I could have been more clear, but that part of the calculations was from the perspective of "what panel wattage rating will I need?," not "what panel output will I need?"

A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation: If you run your 85Ah battery down to 50% each day, you'll theoretically need 42.5 Ah of solar charging per day. Factor in charging system inefficiencies, and call it 55Ah. If you have 5 sun hours (not hours of sunlight) per day, that means you'll need...

Can I charge a Trojan T105 battery (actually, I'm talking about 2 T105s in series, but that doesn't matter for this discussion) with a 75A charger without damaging (shortening the lifespan of) the battery? If I call correctly, Trojan says to limit charging current to 12-13% of the Ah rating, but...