Today was the day when everything was completed and under more testing. That is somewhat of a contradiction. "Everything" means that the stand is completed. Aside from some very minor touchups here and there, the stand is completed. The panels are emplaced on the stand, and operational. Therefore, the test was to see how much output I could get out of it. Trouble is, the sun didn't shine that much today. Therefore, I have to try it again.
Even so, I was able to do a lot of things. I ran every lite in the trailer, for instance. The ones with the old style energy hog design, which will get hot to the touch. You know from the heat that it is using a lot of wattage. These haven't been rated by yours truly, but I'd reckon it to ba about 20 watts. I had 4 of these running all at the same time. That is nearly as much as the swamper will use. So even on a cloudy day, the panels can run the swamper and still charge the battery.
That's not the thing that worries me. What happens if there is too much output? I'd have to flip the switch to the off position. Seems like a huge waste if I were to have to do that. By the way, I installed a switch that cuts out the solar panel output to the controller. When the switch is off, the battery doesn't get charged. Nothing can be run off the controller either. In fact, running anything will eventually run down the 12 volt battery.
I'd like to see if I can do some exotic stuff. Would it suck down more juice if I ran something on the 24 volt, and tha voltage drop was greater on that while it was being charged? Or would it simply try to draw everything off the 12 volt? If that is the case, nothing too much greater than 100 watts will cause too big of a voltage drop. If such were to happen, the 12 volt inverter would issue a warning noise, and then shut down.
The other inverter should be employed instead for heavy loads. But that doesn't mean that the extra wattage will go into the 24 volt via the inverter, you see. The charger will pull a little over 100 watts. You can run the charger on it, and charger both batteries. If you pull some heavy work off the 24 volt, it will just take a little longer to charge, that's all. At least, that is what I expect.
The "heavy" load will be limited to no more than 500 watts total. That's because the 24 volt inverter is limited to that. That's not enough to do all that much, but I am thinking it might be worth a try to run the egg cooker device. It uses only 300 watts. Besides eggs, it might cook small meals too. But there's a trick to that. Anyway, that could get interesting.
The dehumidifier uses about 300 watts. Using the swamper and this thing in tandem would max out the inverter. Don't know if I'd push it that hard for long. Cooking something doesn't take that long. The dehumidifier needs to run for hours on end.
Basically, I testing it all out to see what I can do with it. Mainly, I just want something that can be useful. If it can cool the place down and cook small meals, that ain't too bad.
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