yes good morning YouTube so this is the 40 amp tracer MPPT charge controller that I have running
my 12 volt lead acid battery system so this was the first solar charge controller and my original
12 volt batteries that I set up back in 2013 so this 12 volt DC output feeds various loads in the
house I have some 12-volt DC Circuit's run so up above the patio enclosure here I have a total of
4 335 watt panels on my tilting solar panel rack which I showed you video of setting that up three
of those panels feed my 24 volt system which is over to the right and then one of those panels
feeds the 12 volt system and what I would really like to do is have all four of those panels feed
the 24 volt system Z I need something to power my 12 volt loads and one option is something like
this this is a 30 amp buck converter 24 volts in 12 volts out my original plan was to wire this up
and this does have a remote control input where you can turn this on and off so that's an option
this does work I haven't tried the 30 amps but it does put out 12 volts it takes the 24 volts in
so my 12 volt system has the remote display it's really nice having a meter there that can record
data and so at the end of the month I can read this meter and record the amp hours of DC power
I've used in the house and track that so it was something like that I lose that feature so my plan
was to get one of these DC panel meters here it's the idea as I would take this meter and hook it to
the output of this power supply and I could have a similar feature I may end up doing something like
that with the meter and that separate DC power supply this one does have the serial rs-232 data
nection there that feeds the MT 5 meter and I think there might be some software available
that talks to these older charge controllers but I've got my newer charge controller the EP ever 40
amp MPPT and this one has a USB cable and there's the solar power monitor program that EP ever makes
and I was thinking one of these is basically a DC to DC step-down converter it I could feed
my 24 volt in here where the panels are connect up my batteries right here connect the DC load
here I could plug this cable in to the data port on the controller so then I could feed that into
the house and have the serial data come in and I could monitor that charge controller from inside
the house and see what's going on so my thinking is I'm gonna take this old charge controller out
of service I'll use it on another project and I'll put the new EP ever in place here so let me
throw my transfer switch here ok and there you can see the DC load is now 0 amps so I'm now feeding
my DC loads with AC power so I've added about 65 watts of AC power on the 24 volt inverter to run
that power supply so now I can just disconnect the 12-volt system so anyway let me do a little
reconfigure in here and I'll show you what the new charge controller looks like ok you tube I think
we got it set up here I've swapped to the 42:15 B and I've got it switched back to the 12-volt gel
battery type instead of my lithium-ion 16 volts pulling in two amps off the solar panels doing
about two and a half amps into the battery's 3.1 amps into the DC load right there now right now
I'm still connected to the single 335 watt solar panel and what I'll do it tonight I'll disconnect
the solar panel leads after the Sun Goes Down and then I'll run a pair of wires over from the SPMS
120 and connect them up here and this thing will now see 24 volts for the solar panel input a good
morning YouTube so I've got my solar panels tilted over to the summer angle now apparently looking
at them edge on there on my rack but last night I got the two panels on the right side hooked up in
series and then the two panels on the left side are hooked up in series and then I've got them
wired in parallel down at my combiner box let's go take a look at the charge controller display
and also we can look at the 12 volt system as well yes here's the display from the EP
ever charge controller and this is using the e box Wi-Fi transmitter which is connected to my
Wi-Fi network and then I'm bringing this in with a virtual serial port driver so my solar panels for
this charge controller is actually the DC output from the SPMS 120 battery management system so
you can see the battery voltage right now is twenty seven point seven two and the charge
controller is bringing in three point one eight amps the batteries are basically sitting at float
voltage thirteen point eight here there's about 0.87 amps going into the batteries so I've got
about five-and-a-half amps of DC load or about seventy-five 76 watts and then down here on bar
graph you can see I've got the current displayed the green here this is the battery current so it
pretty much jumps around between a half and one amp the blue is my load so this was kind of my
overnight load and then I turned on some lights I think I turned on the kitchen lights here and then
I turned on my home heating system the solar heat system which runs some fans off of the 12 volt so
that went up here and then I'd been running some lights out in the garage and fans up in the attic
things like that got up 13 14 amps and then it's dropped back down to where it's around five or
six amps right now so that's the tracer 42 15 B and charge controller and I can view that and
then here is my 24 volt system and I can monitor that this is running from a USB cable to a star
tech USB extender basically that's like a four port USB hub with a cat5 cable that runs into
the house and then I plug the USB extender into my Synology nass and then it serves up the USB
port over the network and then I can connect to that from any device in my home network so right
here we're running thirty-eight volts coming in off of the solar panels 279 watts you can
see here's the same battery voltage twenty seven point seven so that's the same as we were getting
here this 12-volt charge controller sees the battery voltage of the 24 volt system as it's
solar input okay and here we have the 24 volt charge controller here and we're looking at 63
64 volts on the PV input so it's like 32 volts per panel bringing in 745 watts and we're pretty
much hitting the peak battery voltage it'll start throttling back at 28 volts and we're getting 21
amps at charging it typically was only seeing like a little over 11 amps as the most I remember so
yeah we're definitely getting a lot more charging and then we're running the home heating system the
solar heat as well as the freezer out in the garage so we're putting out about 290 watts of
AC power so let's just go in dudei and browse yeah and here you can see the PV power goes up
right about here is when the Sun comes around the trees that are off to my east and then it
jumps up we're up pretty close to 800 watts so I'm not sure today if I'll get over a thousand
because like I say the batteries are getting pretty full but if we look at the solar panel
voltage yeah we were up pretty close to 80 volts there and now it's pulling it down as we're trying
to get the maximum power point so yeah here's my 12-volt system it's pulling 9.2 amps out of the
24 volt batteries there at 27.2 pulling in roughly 250 Watts from the 24 volt side and we're putting
out about 236 watts of DC power so that's running a bunch of lights in the house and also the home
heating blowers I'll be making additional videos I'll put those over here on the left side and yeah
if you have any other questions about the system anything I didn't cover ideas for future videos
go ahead and post up in the comment section down below and as always thanks for watching