good morning youtube welcome to another installment in my solar power series
unboxing videos seem to be popular on youtube so here goes mine i received this box
in the mail last week this was purchased from ebay seller solarseller.com website and the
return address is john drake services incorporated let's see what's inside
looks to be pretty nicely packed we've got some information there bunch of packing peanuts
and here's the good stuff
this appears to be a trimet bogart engineering tm 2030 rv trimetric battery monitoring system
i purchased the system with a 100 amp shunt since that is about the maximum i expect to pull
with a 1000 watt usually i'm only using a few hundred watts except for starting motor loads
so inside looks like this is the trimetric display and then here is the current shot
depending on how i connect it the meter can read all sorts of battery system parameters
i'll be connecting it up to look at only the batteries
placing this shunt in the negative bus between the batteries and the loads i'll place a link
to the trimetric web page so you can see all the parameters it can measure
my main goal is to be able to measure what is going into
and out of my battery bank on a day-to-day basis
my solar charge controller shows me charging current and voltage
and has a curved state of charge display but that's it the trimetric logs current and voltage
over time into and out of the battery bank and uses that to calculate an accurate state of charge
as my solar power system loads grow i need to know how many amp hours i'm pulling from the batteries
overnight so i can know when i'm getting to the limit of how deeply i want to discharge them
i only have some rough estimates of what the batteries supply overnight
so once i hook this thing up i should know exactly the only problem is i can't hook this up at the
present time as i need to do some major rewiring on my battery bank so sit tight until i can get
that underway and then i'll be back when i'm ready to connect this to the rewired battery bank
well i couldn't wait to get the battery bank rewired so i installed the meter shunt
temporarily down here i found an extra flat ground strap and use that to tie
the shunt to the battery negative bus then the cables for the inverter and charge controller
attached to the other side of the shunt i chose this 100 millivolt shunt initially as
it'll give me readings down to 10 milliamps or one more digit than my charge controller
or clamp on ammeter shows so i set the trimetric reader to use the smaller shunt
and set up the battery voltage and current readings to match my charge controller
you can see here it reads uh voltage there's the current battery charging current
percent full and then you can also do hold the button down and this will show you
uh basically the amp hours from full so it's uh 0.08 amp hours from full and that gives you the
100 essentially 100 state of charge
and the trimetric meter uses a combination of the charging voltage
and the charging current and basically if the charging voltage is above the threshold
you set and the charging current is below the threshold you set and it stays there
for a time which you can set up as well that determines that the battery is fully charged
and then it it monitors the current flowing into and out of the battery bank
along with a charging efficiency parameter to determine how many amp hours the battery
is from full and you can program you can program the battery bank amp hour capacity as
another parameter and with this you get a fairly accurate state of charge reading it's not based
upon voltage and temperature but rather how many amp hours have been withdrawn from the battery
bank the advantage here is that the reading is continuous and can be taken with the batteries
connected to a load the traditional temperature and voltage based state of charge is done in
open circuit and after the battery has been sitting for a while for the voltage to stabilize
in the first few days of testing i see my battery bank is in the 90 to 92 percent state of charge
in the morning or in other words my overnight loads are using 18 to 20 amp hours of power
i see about 1.3 amps of load from the attic fans and the tv amplifiers that are running right now
this is good to know as i can double the amount of constant loads and keep the batteries above
an eighty percent state of charge with separate current readings for the inverter
the battery bank and the charge controller output i can really see what is happening
with my system so stay tuned for an upcoming video where i show some of these test results
and i'll cover the battery bank rewiring in an upcoming video
if you have any questions feel free to join the conversation in the comments section below be sure
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