We have the solar controller wired up. We still need to add the batter temperature wire which I forgot to hook up again and eventually the wires to the water heater dump.
First we traced the wires from the solar panels from the top of the bimini solar panes (two 135 and one 85 watt) to the buss. We did this just to check my work. We had to remove the cam cleat and while we were doing this we added wires to the flood light so would reach through the cam cleat.
Debbie suggested we use two black #16 wires to connect to the #18 so we did not have a red or say white positive wire in the bundle of black wires. We did this and it looks great. We of course labeled the wires so we can hook up (in this case) a white wire to the positive that came from the flood light to continue the wiring.
Debbie also added some heat shrink to the connections and the job looks nice.
Sure enough I had crossed a positive with a negative wire going to the buss. I mislabeled a wire and ended up with tow positives to the positive side and one negative. Luckily the solar panels have diodes in them to prevent revers current. I think this happens when they are connected in a series and one gets part shaded. Any way there seems to be no damage. Debbie asked me if the negative wire should spark when connecting it to the buss and I am not sure of the answer. I think not.
Debbie back in the lazzerett, this time it's the Starboard side 😘
Chassis ground wire had to go through top knock out.
We then stripped the
#4 gauge wires and put in the wire holders into the knock outs. We had to take that
last knock out of the three holes to make them ¾ inch instead of ½ inch. That
done we screwed in the knock out plugs.
Next was getting the #4 g wire into the controller and secured. A bit of a
wrestling match but we got it done.
Debbie putting the bimini back up after we got the wiring straight.
We pulled the old # 6 gauge wires from the controller to house batteries and put the new #4 gauge wires through our new path and wired them to the house batteries.
Controller shows batteries at 12.2. We are not sure about the heath of these old batteries
Shows that we are charging at 9.9 amps from the panels.
It was late in the day when we finished and the sky way mostly cloudy. We were getting 9.9 amps from the panels.
This turned out to be an all day project and we did not have the energy to install the condensation shield that we made up from the plastic junction box.
Remember the lazzeretts are full of stuff and it all needs a moving etc.
Sunday we looked once and we were getting 15 amps but again it was cloudy and the panels were dirty and it was still morning. We should get more amps than that but still 15 is better than 0!
We also will be connecting the wind generator to the solar controller through the buss.
Today it is raining so it may be the end of the week before we can try the refer on the house batteries to see how they solar and refer draw works out on the house batteries.
What we are hoping to achieve from these panels is never needing to
run the engine or Honda 2000 generator to charge the batteries while at anchor.
So say we are at anchor for
a month, never needing anything but the solar and wind generator for power.
This may be a tall order as
we will be running a water maker and the refrigeration.
We have however really insulated
the refer box well and have a Fridoboat keel cooler system which is new and
real efficient.
We do not have a microwave.
Debbie does not use a hair drier😁
We do have an electric toothbrush and I use a water pick so the inverted will get used each night for the water pick.
Also I need to use a breathing
machine while I sleep and am not sure the dray on this per night but it is a
big draw.
Possibly an anchor alarm.
There rest are small stuff
like LED lights etc.
We will start testing this out at the dock in the coming weeks.
All but the water maker as we have not purchased this yet. We may be able to
simulate the draw though.
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