Solar Panel Battery Charge Time
winger
Registered Users Posts: 1
Hi I'm new to solar power so I hope someone can answer this easily. If you can share the math so I can do it myself in the future I'd appreciate it!
I have deep cycle LiPo model airplane batteries I need to charge. They're typically 12V @ 1-5 amps, and have a 500 Ah capacity. My question is how long would it take to charge this battery with solar panel(s) at X watts (for X=50, 100, 200, 300, 500, 1000). Do I need to hook up to more than 1 panel and use some voltage converter to get some of these higher powers? Any recommendations on panels, converters, connection schemes, or other pieces I need would be great!
Thanks so much in advanced everyone..
I have deep cycle LiPo model airplane batteries I need to charge. They're typically 12V @ 1-5 amps, and have a 500 Ah capacity. My question is how long would it take to charge this battery with solar panel(s) at X watts (for X=50, 100, 200, 300, 500, 1000). Do I need to hook up to more than 1 panel and use some voltage converter to get some of these higher powers? Any recommendations on panels, converters, connection schemes, or other pieces I need would be great!
Thanks so much in advanced everyone..
Comments
Welcome to the forum.
What you and we need to know here is what the battery manufacturer recommends for charge rate & Voltage. Then see if solar can be used as a source to duplicate that need. Chances are it can.
This bit I don't understand: "They're typically 12V @ 1-5 amps, and have a 500 Ah capacity." A battery is rated in Voltage & Amp hours @ rate (20 hour rate is typically used for RE). What is the 1 to 5 Amps? Discharge rate used or recommended peak charging current? It would be pretty ridiculous to try and charge a 500 Amp hour battery @ 5 Amps as it would take a very long time.
Some batteries recommend a constant current charge, others a Voltage peak & time charge, and various combinations there of. If this were a standard FLA battery in an RE application you'd want to see a peak current of 5 to 13 (or perhaps higher) percent of capacity, or 25 to 65 Amps which would require approximately 400 to 1000 Watts of panel and a good MPPT type charge controller.
Just a guess, but since we are talking about LiPO4 and model airplanes, I suspect that the batteries are 500mah not 500Ah. Unless it is a very very large model!
And a Lithium battery of that size could produce 1-5 amps for a correspondingly short period of time.
That would make more sense.