ND2E

Ham Radio-When All Else Fails.

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Solar

Charging the battery

Friday, December 09 2011 15:34
On cloudy, rainy, or just dull days, the PV array will not provide enough juice to charge the battery that I ran down during the prior evening's QSOs. No sun, no charge. Somehow I should have expected that. To overcome the solar lack I need to apply an AC powered charger to the battery. Earlier, when using the 7 AH battery, I just floated the battery across the Kenwood 25 amp switcher and figured it would charge. That is pretty much right but if I forgot the battery and left it on the power bus for a more than a day, I expect that it may have been overcharged. Since the 7AH battery died an early death I was loath to do the same with a much more expensive battery.
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15 Watt PV Array

Saturday, November 26 2011 20:42

I hung the 15 Watt PV today... Like its brother, it is on the side of the deck with almost no elevation angle.  I also hung a 1.5 Watt solar maintainer that I am using with the solar hot water controller. It is also mounted on the south side with no elevation angle because I don't want it looking at the sky. I want it to be responsive to general illumination not incident light. I may have to put a diffuser over it if it is doesn't do what I expect.pv-aray

Yesterday I put the battery on the 500 mA charger to bring it up to full charge. After almost 24 hours it was effectively at full charge but the charger had not changed over to its float mode because it just hadn't reached the crossover voltage.

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More Solar

Sunday, November 13 2011 17:07

I have had the solar system running since Saturday of last week. There have been several sunny days to charge the battery. It actually came up to full charge one day but then I took the external charger off. The solar charger did not have enough steam to fully charge the battery although it came up to 13.2 volts, I now have a 1 amp charger on the battery and will see if it is the charger or the battery that is weak.

 

Solar Power Update

Thursday, November 24 2011 19:45

After several rainy, cloudy days the solar battery system is down to 12 volts. The PV panel is not providing enough juice on cloudy days to recharge the battery. Of course I have been using the radio a lot to try and prove out the system. In the past week I have made 30+ contacts on PSK and JT65 so the battery has been well exercised.

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ND2E has gone solar

Sunday, November 06 2011 11:45

Since we moved here I have wanted to make the station or at least the radio, solar powered. I have been collecting the bits and pieces since we moved here. Originally I had been using a 7 AH gel battery to float across the 12 volt bus but it was charged by the Kenwood 25 amp power supply that I generally use for the radios. I contemplated eventually buying one of the little 1 or 2 watt solar chargers to keep the battery topped up but never seemed to get around to it.

Last winter, Harbor Freight had their 5 Watt solar module on sale. I jumped at it since it was relatively inexpensive … made in China! They captioned it as a battery charger but I suspect that it is too big for my 7 AH battery since the rule of thumb is 3.5 Watts of solar power for each 100 AH of battery. The 5 Watt solar charger definitely would be overkill for a 7 AH battery.

Over last summer I went searching for a small charge controller since the charger was too big for most any battery I would likely buy, I found a small 3A solar controller at All Electronics. It was cheap enough and it would ease my mind about overcharging a small battery.

In the mean time the 7 AH battery died as did my 3.5 AH battery so I had an unmounted solar charger and no batteries to charge.

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