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If you want to use a charge controller, the best is to buy a MPPT controller. It's more expensive than a
PWM controller but a lot more efficient... With a MPPT controller you can charge your battery even if
the total wattage of your panels equals the rating of the batteries (for example 100 watt panel and
100 Ah battery) This is almost impossible to achieve with a PWM controller. With a PWM controller you
will need 2 times more panels to be able to charge your battery (for example 200 watt panel and 100
Ah battery)
WIRING: Never use smaller than #10 wire to connect your solar panels to the batteries unless your
batteries are less than 5 feet from your panels. Up to 20 feet from the panels you must use wire #10,
father you must use #8 or even #6... The farther the bigger wire.
FUSE AND BREAKER: for a small set up you need only a breaker or a fuse between the inverter and
the batteries. If you have a controller you will also need a fuse or a breaker between the controller
and the panels. Breaker and fuse must be for DC current not AC.
So, now, concretely, how it works? Ok, lets take my small set up as example. As I said earlier, I have
3 x 50 watts panels, 3 x 125 Ah batteries, 1 x 1000 pure sine wave inverter, 1 fuse box with no fuse
that I use as a switch, between the solar panels and the batteries and 1 DC breaker between the
batteries and the inverter. Batteries and solar panels are wired in parallel to give me a total of 150
watts solar panels and 375 Ah capacity battery. My batteries are only 30 % discharged everyday
(meaning that I could use 2 times more appliances or 2 times longer than I do up to now. But because
the weather is still bad (still rainy season) I prefer to keep my batteries charge in case of brownout
(frequent here).
So with this set up, I can run my laptop (50 watts) 8 hours, my led tv (80 watts) 4 hours, dream
satellite receiver (20 watts) 4 hours, a led bulb 4 hours, external speakers (5 watts) 4 hours. As I
said, I could run two times longer time all these appliances and my batteries will still be 40 %
charged. When summer will be back, I will also run my ref. I already tried it and it works fine. The
only problem is that I dont have enough batteries to run it at night so I will just run it in daytime.
Be aware that appliances with engine like fan, power tools, blender, can be harsh on solar...
Now its time for questions..... Feel free to ask, I will do my best to answer you
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