solar and battery charger conflict

Thanks for your reply. No shunt fitted to the system. The solar panels and the pL20 plasmatronic regulator are wired up as the manufacturer instructions. Does that help you help me? Dave

Without a shunt the pl20 will not be able to measure the input from the charger and calculate the SOC correctly.

Cheers Lex will give that a try and see where we end up . thanks Dave

As Lex says, you need to charge via a shunt and a Plasmatronics PLS2 that tells the PL20 what is going through the shunt, then the PL20 will know wt goes in and out. The same shut can be used for loads as the PLS2 is 2 way.

Cheers,
Peter
OKA196 Motorhome

""Any 2 chargers are going to sense the voltage of the other and reduce the amount of charge because the charge level of each is higher than the actual battery level and they are sensing each other""

Yes, the same applies to the Alternator & Solar when driving too

Mainey . . .

Interesting statement.
Both chargers are sensing battery voltage and trying to do what they want. Neither knows or cares why the voltage is what it is.

An alternator is a voltage controlled charger so unless the solar is capable of pulling the battery voltage higher than the alternator voltage it makes little difference to the alternator.
If the solar charger is a smart charger than it is probably trying to get the battery voltage higher than the alternator output voltage and can only do that if it can supply enough current to supply all the engine running requirements and have some enough left over to charge the battery. This would mean the output of the alternator would reduce to (almost) nothing. If either source can raise the battery voltage sufficiently to affect the other then the battery(s) must be charged sufficiently so it doesn't really matter.

From measurement:-
If the battery is well charged, my solar charger increases its current output with the engine running as the battery voltage it sees is lower than when the engine is stopped.
If the battery is down, the solar output does not change as was (and still is) trying to charge the battery higher than the alternator voltage.

Disconnecting the solar changes the alternator current output by approx what the solar was outputting at the time.

The measured input to the aux battery with the battery well charged and good sunlight and engine running is nearly 4 amps from solar and about the same or slightly less from alternator.

(120ah AGM, 80 watt mono panel mounted flat, and powertech controller.)