I am no artist.
Unfortunately, the only way I could understand how to wire our batteries together was to draw a picture. Open Office has a nice drawing program. Despite its niceness, my drawing is not attractive. I think though that it’s accurate and it’s nice to have as documentation.
On a side note: Our blog is surprisingly nice for documentation. The other day I had to look up the pay load for the truck (hauling bags of cement) and it couldn’t have been easier.
This is the physical layout as well
The idea here is to create one giant 48 volt battery from a bunch (24) of 12 volt batteries.
The process is to wire the batteries together both serially and in parallel. Groups of four batteries are wired together in series to get up to 48 volts. (In the picture, this is the little wires that go from positive to negative.) The blocks of 48 volts are wired together in parallel to create the giant battery. (In the picture, the red and black wires are in parallel.)
Not according to plan, but electrically correct
Yes, as Karen pointed out, not according to plan. I confess that when I bought all the solar equipment I didn’t understand exactly how it all went together. I can’t imagine what I was thinking. I didn’t have the right cables to follow my plan. I was going to order the right cables when I realized I could use what I had. Instead of linking each block together with the one above it, I link it with the one above and across. It’s the same electrically, but a little funky.
Battery details:
Sun Xtender PVX-2580L AGM Sealed Battery
Volts: 12
Amp hours: 255
This is an addendum to my original post. The battery wiring went through a little reworking. This is the final physical layout. I wouldn’t have added the horizontal wiring; however, since I had them I used them to insure the lowest possible resistance.
The final physical configuration
The wires between the batteries are 2/0 and the ones going to the inverter are 4/0.
Do you still recommend this? how did it turn out was it ok?
I ended up changing it to a star shape. Each block of four going into a central connector (1 pos and 1 neg) and then two wires from the center to the inverter — it worked well — we got about 9 years of use from those batteries.