Solar Regulators and Distance from Battery issues

Ambiguous and non sensicle. (An alternator "driving" a solar regulator??!! Do they mean "common connection" or is there something I am not understanding?)

Collyn Rivers and similar seem to restate normal practice - the regulator (like an alternator) must sense the battery voltage - not some point in between....

Nevertheless, as I wrote above, any voltage drop between the regulator and the battery means the battery is being undercharged (whether relative to available power/voltage, its nominal 14.4V charge voltage, or nominal 13.8V float voltage).

I'm not sure where they get their "less float voltage" for AGM batteries - they are still lead-acid so the normal 14.4V & 13.8V targets/limits apply.
Whilst AGMs may do ok with a lower float voltage (less risk of sulfation), why reduce it from the norm? (Temperature compensation is a different issue, but since our solar regulators rarely have a specific Sense input, they are unlikely to provide remote temperature sensing. Or has that changed?)

Hi Peter,

I would suggest that you would need to be very careful in doing this.

For example, if you had a battery that was near full and a small fridge that was already down to temp', so the power usage would be quite low (eg 1.5 amps / hour or less).
The solar panel in this post is a 100 watt, or around 6.5 amps, so I will use that in this example.

If there was good sunlight for 7.5 hours (Australian average) then there would be an extra 37.5 amps put into your battery after the fridge has used what it needed.

For a 100 amp/hour battery, that could potentially put an extra 30% into your battery that it isn't designed for.

I understand what you are saying, I'm trying to make sure that people are careful running solar panels without a regulator.

Thanks, Brodie
Warranty Manager
Evakool