Working out the kinks in solar system.

[yorkj2006]

All the controllers I know of need stand alone wired directly to the battery otherwise you mess up the voltage monitoring ability and they don’t charge the battery correctly. No reason to tie them to the bus bars which are tied to other stuff and will no doubt cause voltage monitoring issues with the controller ?

I think of my bus bars as an extension of my battery terminals and that because of them all being connected by electricity conducive wires they basically become one large positive and one large negative battery terminal. The shunt being the only path through to the actual negative battery terminal allows it to measure total IO's from and to the batteries, otherwise it's all the same.... Am I missing something?

 

[yorkj2006]

So I've had everything set up and running based on the last diagram except that I've put the solar panels in series instead of parallel. Things are looking pretty good so far. Battery's lowest voltage was 13.03 and has been up to 13.67 while still running the fridge in the trailer full time. Also it's currently only getting full sun for about 2-3 hours a day and is directly under a large oak tree, so it doesn't get the noon to 3-4pm sun at all... Going to move it into direct sun on friday and see what happens. Hoping to be able to run the fridge exterior light, and max air fan without having to hook it up to AC power. I'm thinking that another 200 watts off solar suitcase may be enough to get me off grid for all but 3-4 day rain storms or something similar. We shall see...

 

[dfinn]

Sounds like you got it figured out but I'm thinking that 50' of 10AWG was causing a whole lot of voltage drop, creating issues for you as well. You might still want to consider shortening that or going to a heavier duty wire. Now that you're wired in serial you're not pushing nearly as many amps so the wire is happier now.

edit: just re-read and saw that you said that's temporary until you do the final install.