{"id":2730,"date":"2012-05-26T09:33:35","date_gmt":"2012-05-26T16:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/?p=2730"},"modified":"2012-05-26T09:33:35","modified_gmt":"2012-05-26T16:33:35","slug":"solar-power-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/archives\/2730","title":{"rendered":"Solar power update"},"content":{"rendered":"

I believe my last post on our solar power suggested things were not going well with the batteries. Well, I’m happy to report a turnaround.<\/p>\n

When I got concerned about the way I wired the batteries together and rewired them, I created trouble. I switched the battery wiring to a spider or wheel style and ended up with seven fat battery cables all held together with a single bolt. At the time I was concerned about the quality of the connection, but they were all touching and the bolt was tight — really tight. I hoped it was fine.<\/p>\n

Over time, things continued to get worse. I worried the connection was not solid and finally found this beauty on line:<\/p>\n

\"battery<\/a>

This is how we do it now<\/p><\/div>\n

Ideally, it would have seven connectors and not five, but this is what I found. It, however, is working great. The batteries have all bounced back. When the sun goes down the initial voltage is higher than I’ve seen in a great while: 50.5-ish. The voltage remains high for much longer too. It’s frequently still above 50 volts late into the night. There was a time when the voltage dropped to 49.1-ish as soon as the sun set. Further evidence of improvement was a day with virtually no sun — we powered through the day and on until the next without concern — or skimping.<\/p>\n

It’s such an improvement that I’ve set the generator into\u00a0maintenance mode in order to make sure it runs once in awhile.<\/p>\n

A nice convenience with this battery connector is the wiring block at the top. You can pull off 48 volts for DC powered things here — I’m not using it, but I would have if I’d bought it when I installed the system.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I believe my last post on our solar power suggested things were not going well with the batteries. Well, I’m happy to report a turnaround. When I got concerned about the way I wired the batteries together and rewired them, I created trouble. I switched the battery wiring to a spider or wheel style and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-2730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-solar"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}