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PL 60 Solar charger


Geoff and Marion Bowden

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Three Twelve month old gel batteries show about 13.3 V charge from Three 120 W solar panels which put in about 8 amps total in full sunlight but Centaur Charger 12/40 puts in 40 amps when turned on - any suggestions as to problem ?? Geoff (new owner and learning)


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Have to ask how long the charger puts in 40 amps for. Our van has a xantrex 40 amp charger and depending on what power has been used it will start at 40 amp and over an hour will drop down to about 5 amps. With the solar , we have 3 x135 watt panel and output varies with position of sun, is the side of the van with 2 panels on facing the sun, if it is winter the sun won't be directly overhead at midday so shadow from the A/C and tv aerial will degrade output. I have placed a hand on a panel and the shade from the hand will knock 70% of output from the panel involved. If the shadow from the A/C is on the 2 panels on one side then it certainly doesn't help. I think the best I have seen is 18 amp output from the panels. Hope this helps a bit to understand things.


Den and Col


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There could be a couple of explanations for this.



Initially, your PL-60 charger is probably in "Float" mode, meaning that it has given the batteries the bulk of the charge and is now simply tracking the load in your van (which must have been about 8 Amps at the time you were looking.) Under float conditions, the PL-60 will not put any more current into the batteries than the load being drawn, otherwise the battery is at risk of being overcharged.



When you turn on the 240V charger it probably looks at the batteries and says "OK, I'll go through charge-cycle (which could raise the battery volts as high as 14.4 Volts) and then I'll go into float mode". I'm guessing that the initial 40 Amp charge (which would include 8 Amps going to the load) would drop away very quickly because the batteries are fully charged. The 240 Volt charger would be monitoring the battery voltage, which in turn would rise rapidly because the batteries are fully charged, and would go into Float mode quite quickly.



Another possibility is this: Your PL-60 appears to have its Float voltage set to 13.3V. The 240V charger may be set to a higher Float voltage, say 13.6V. The initial in-rush of current may simply be the 240V charger raising the battery volts to what it thinks the Float voltage should be.



Either way, something is not quite right about the settings in your system. If the batteries are indeed gel-cell, then the Float voltage for this type of battery is typically 13.1 Volts. If the batteries are AGM, then the float voltage should be 13.6V - 13.8V You may want to double-check what is written on the batteries (along with the type of battery, the information on the battery often includes the manufacturer's recommended voltage for Float and Maximum Charge.) Once the type of battery has been established, the chargers can then be set to match this and each other.



Cheers



Russ


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