Sunday, May 05, 2013 at 09:47
Be very aware there is a hell of a lot of misinformation running around about batteries and charging and what this or that battery will do....but I'll let that pass for now.
first and most important....all good changers, both solar and mains are looking for a direct relationship with a single battery.....they may tolerate a bank of batteries.
when we have two chargers connected to the same battery powered up or not we run into problems...
SO
Do you have the solar and the 240V charger connected at the same time?......Don't.
one charger connected to any given battery at any one time...unless the system is specifically designed otherwise.
On the matter of the fridge....is this a compressor bassed fridge or a 3 way fridge that will run on gas.
If it is a 3 way fridge that runs on gas, they are incredibly inefficient on either 240V or 12 volts.....on 240V who cares you are on mains......on 12 volts 3 way fridges are only viable when the engine is running, because they draw heaps and all the time.
A complication is that 3 way fridges are almost always wired to 12 volts in cable that is far too small.......efficiency then suffers.
By all means run the 3 way fridge on 12 volts when traveling, but when you stop run on gas.
On cable issues.
We live in a metric country, anybody who knows their business about electrics will be talking in square milimeters when refeering to cable.......yes there is plenty of American Wire Guage cable about, but to do any calculations we must convert to mm.
8 guage is close as damit to 8mm2...in fact "proper 8 guage" is 7.91mm2.
On the matter of the charger......don't worry about the settings or the side issues about what voltage people claim you need to charge this or that battery.......get that battery charger hooked to the battery on its own with no solar and no other load and see how it goes.
As for the notion that you can charge a "glass mat battery in only a few hours"...that is false....SOME AGM batteries may tollerate and accepet charge faster and better than others but...there is no free lunch and some AGM have very limited charge rates.
no matter what the battery, if it is at a low state of discharge regardless of the size of the charger or battery capacity expect charging to take time think in terms 8 hours minimum or over night rather than the " few hours".
cheers
AnswerID:
510352