How do I hook up this solar kit?

[caithnesscrofter]

I've acquired a solar kit reciently that contains a 40W solar panel, 110 A battery, 400W inverter and a solar controller.

I know very little about electric anything and I'm scratching my head over how to get the power into the battery. I realise the solar panel should hook directly into the solar controller then the solar controller into the battery but, the solar controller has tiny leads with just bare wires. Will I need to connect a one ended jump/crocodile lead thingie to the solar controller in order to hook it to the battery?

Thanks for any input you might have!

[Martin]

The controller should come with a simple circuit diagram that shows you what goes where - do you have one, or do you know it's make and model?
Crocodile clips are rather frowned on (they can fall off) - you'd be far better off with the same sort of terminal used in a car
As for inverters..............
I've posted on the subject before - salesmen oversell the blessed things massively - if you were to be drawing all of the advertised 400 watts, that's
around 35 amps - the battery would be flat in 2 hours, stone dead in 3! - Be careful, it's a BIG inverter (you should have a battery bank around 3-4 times as big to run it satisfactorily!)

[caithnesscrofter]

Thanks for your reply Martin. Do you have a photo or example of what I should buy to hook to the solar controller wires? The solar controller does have a diagram as far as your neg and pos terminals.

As far as the inverter, I don't even think I have 400 watts to hook into the inverter. The only things I have to power are a laptop which is 1.5 amps I believe and my mobile phone which is my modem and sometimes I top up my solar lantern which has its own array but, on some days is not quite powerful enough to charge it all the way. I have a printer but, it's only used for about 10 minutes a month at most.

I've got a 3.3 diesel generator that runs our water pump and I currently charge this battery off that and a full charge in the battery tends to run my current set up for a week. Expensive way to charge it tho so, would be good to get the solar panel topping up the battery.

[floydster]

Should be a piece of cake.

You'll probably only need to connect four wires like below (click for a bigger picture)



The black and yellow on the left are the +ve and -ve from the solar panel. The red and black coming out the right of the controller go to the battery. That's it. Just connect your inverter to the battery.



I bought a couple of battery terminal connectors from my local car spares shop for all the connections to the battery.

Here's the full album

I recently bought some very good 12V lighting from this eBay shop

Hope this helps,

Floydster

[floydster]

Remembered I had put some clearer pictures here

Floydster

[caithnesscrofter]

cheers for the response floyd. Looks like you've got a good little system hooked up there. The picture is small and I can't quite make out what the connectors to the battery look like. Do they have a name and is it something I can buy easily off ebay or something?

[caithnesscrofter]

nevermind.................... I see these things that go over the battery terminal posts however, if I connect the solar charger to the battery using these am I still able to connect my inverter at the same time? The inverter came with jump/croc leads.

[Martin]

yes you can!
The other thing to bear in mind is battery life - even with the best gel batteries, the deeper you discharge them before recharging the faster they clap out!
Figures that spring to mind are "300 cycles to 70% DOD"....a good gel battery should provide that - take 70% out each time, it'll do it 300 times before failure
(do that once a day, it's knackered in a year!) - BUT it's ~"pro rata" - using that same battery, if you only took 10% before recharge, it would last 7x300 = 2,100 cycles! - Hence you would be very wise not to take too much out of the battery before recharging each time~!
(an ordinary "leisure" battery will only do 100 cycles to 50%........ )

[caithnesscrofter]

Thanks for the info about the batteries. I'm afraid you'll have to spell out how I go about hooking both the inverter and the solar controller with the terminal post hingies on at the same time.