Monday, November 21, 2022

Problem with my small solar setup

 Well here it is 3:30 am and 37°F outside. And I can't tell the difference between the caps lock key and the alt key.

I was having the strangest damn dream. I always dream stupid stuff when I gotta wake up to go pee.

Finally woke up, and I am hearing a loud whining noise. And no, it wasn't me.

Trace it down to my dc to ac inverter hanging outside on the back wall. The display said low and it was alarming to let me know. God it was loud. 

So here I am at 3 in the damn morning in my bare feet on the patio in colder than holy hell weather for this pathetic warm weather man.


Turn off the inverter and get a look at the voltage reading on the 2 month old lithium iron phosphate battery I recently installed.

Said 10.2 volts. Aw crapanitley I says. When I went to bed it was at 13+ volts. I forgot to unplug the fridge. Checked the thermometer in the fridge and it was still in the ideal range, so hopefully the alarm didn't go off long enough to wake the neighbors. As I said, it was loud.

I usually unplug it at 13 volts(which is supposed to be about 30% capacity) cause, even though apparently it is done without damage to the battery, I didn't want to discharge it further. Still learning about this battery. 

And supposedly cold weather makes some sort of difference to the battery monitoring system. 

I will sort it out tomorrow.


2 comments:

  1. Interesting story. (I have contemplated the refrigerator solar route).

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    1. I will now dig out the owners manual for my inverter and find out what the low voltage cutoff setting is. I have a second battery. I am contemplating installing that in parallel with the first to increase capacity. For emergency backup for a refrigerator, the system I have works very well. Especially when you keep your eye on it as I forgot to do last night.

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