watt loss ts-60 pwm

Shawn-H

the ts-60 i have is the pwm version and i was wondering if i can get my Ah back buy turning off the pwm function? it seems to me to just run it in bulk and jump it back and forth from max charging voltage and float. both have loss but witch is better?

Cariboocoot

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Shawn-H wrote: »

the ts-60 i have is the pwm version and i was wondering if i can get my Ah back buy turning off the pwm function? it seems to me to just run it in bulk and jump it back and forth from max charging voltage and float. both have loss but witch is better?

There's no advantage to that at all. Nor is there any way to "turn off" the PWM function.
The PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) is used to regulate Voltage at the output during Absorb and Float stages: it turns the controller on and off rapidly as needed to maintain the Voltage set point.
In Bulk mode the charge controller passes all the current the panels put out. The PWM controllers can not adjust the higher panel Voltage into more charge current no matter what you do; panels are a current source and basically allow their Voltage to be 'whatever'.

You can adjust the charging Voltage set points, and can use the Equalization function to raise battery Voltage above normal charge levels for short durations in order to bring SG up across all cells.

Shawn-H

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Cariboocoot wrote: »

There's no advantage to that at all. Nor is there any way to "turn off" the PWM function.
The PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) is used to regulate Voltage at the output during Absorb and Float stages: it turns the controller on and off rapidly as needed to maintain the Voltage set point.
In Bulk mode the charge controller passes all the current the panels put out. The PWM controllers can not adjust the higher panel Voltage into more charge current no matter what you do; panels are a current source and basically allow their Voltage to be 'whatever'.

You can adjust the charging Voltage set points, and can use the Equalization function to raise battery Voltage above normal charge levels for short durations in order to bring SG up across all cells.

that is not what the book says. dip switch #8 set to on turns off pwm. then the voltage jumps rapidly between 13.7 and 14.8. so im kinda at a loss as to which would be better?

Cariboocoot

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Shawn-H wrote: »

that is not what the book says. dip switch #8 set to on turns off pwm. then the voltage jumps rapidly between 13.7 and 14.8. so im kinda at a loss as to which would be better?

That's for shunt regulation. Don't use it.

Shawn-H

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Cariboocoot wrote: »

That's for shunt regulation. Don't use it.

ok can you give me a lil more then that. because it seems we are looking at different Operation Manuals mine says that the Operation of PWM can cause noise and that the dip #8 will turn it off though it is strongly suggested to try and remedy the noise issue(with grounding before turning off PWM.

mike95490

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Before you start changing a bunch of things, let's go back to the original - Missing Watts / Ah ??

Did the system used to produce more ? Are the batteries not fully charged at the end of the day ? Why do you think flipping a switch designed to reduce harvest and to reduce electrical noise, will make more power magically appear ?

What are your panels, how wired, battery bank, how old, loads .....

Mike

PNjunction

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Turning off the pwm function is to be used with highly sensitive telcom equipment that during operation, seems to be coming from the controller. Some super sensitive radio equipment may hear the pulses. Most HF gear will not pick up any radiated noise, but if you tightly bundle all your power wiring, and have commercial equipment that can hear an ant walking on the moon, then you *temporarily* put the CC into the non-pwm mode until you can get your wiring shielded / fixed.

Most of use don't have gear that can detect those pulses. None of my Xantrex pwm controllers can be heard in the HF radio spectrum with amateur gear.

Turning off the pwm function turns the controller into a 1970's "ping pong" series/shunt controller, that relies only on the hysteresis of the battery, which is very inefficient. Early on, some pwm controllers allowed you to set the voltages, and users emulated pwm by setting the high/low voltages VERY close to each other. There are problems with that approach relying on the battery hysteresis. Morningstar did extensive testing of this decades ago.

So as mentioned, do not turn off pwm. It is only meant as a temporary band-aid for sensitive telcom equipment that eventually gets proper wiring/shielding, whereupon the pwm is turned back on when when the situation gets fixed. Otherwise, you spent a lot of money for the main feature of the controller that doesn't get used.

Cariboocoot

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Shawn-H wrote: »

ok can you give me a lil more then that. because it seems we are looking at different Operation Manuals mine says that the Operation of PWM can cause noise and that the dip #8 will turn it off though it is strongly suggested to try and remedy the noise issue(with grounding before turning off PWM.

That is correct.
Think of shunt mode as really, really slow PWM.
Normally the controller will switch on/off rapidly, which creates fairly high frequency RF that can cause noise in radios and audio/video equipment. With it switching on and off in shunt mode (they probably don't use that term) this doesn't happen because it's so slow it's not in the right frequency ranges to make irritation RF noise.

Some controllers, btw, have a specific slow switch PWM mode for this.

Shunt control is a method that for the most part went out with old car regulators: they had an "on" Voltage and an "off" Voltage with a fairly wide range between them. It was the only way it could be done when "Voltage regulation" depended on switching V in to a gen between two levels via a current-controlled relay. So it would be on until Voltage reached a certain point, then shut off until it dropped below another point. As you can imagine this type of regulation is not very fine. Batteries don't like it much because in between they are discharging instead of charging. These auto regulators of old (also called "cut outs") have a certain amount of current purposefully 'leaked' to prevent too much discharge.

As far as deep cycle batteries are concerned they prefer to be held at Absorb Voltage with as little fluctuation as possible. There's no charging advantage to using shunt mode, and arguably a disadvantage.

Shawn-H

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

mike95490 wrote: »

Before you start changing a bunch of things, let's go back to the original - Missing Watts / Ah ??

Did the system used to produce more ? Are the batteries not fully charged at the end of the day ? Why do you think flipping a switch designed to reduce harvest and to reduce electrical noise, will make more power magically appear ?

What are your panels, how wired, battery bank, how old, loads .....

Mike

thank you mike but this was all gone through in an earlier post that you commented on. all the specs were given. all i care about is getting at least 75% of what i get from my panel witch i am not.
no the issue is that the panel i'm using is to high for the 12v sys i am running. the charge controller has issues with managing the higher voltages when dropping my vmp of 30.1v i loose a bunch when read from the panel i get 29.3v @ 8.04A 236w (AS OF 10 MIN AGO) but when checked to the batteries from the controller it is 14.8v @ 8.63A 128W that is a shit ton of my total. i need that bk and don't have the $$$.$$ to blow for something i will not use on my 48v sys that i'm putting in in 8 moths.

Shawn-H

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Cariboocoot wrote: »

That is correct.
Think of shunt mode as really, really slow PWM.
Normally the controller will switch on/off rapidly, which creates fairly high frequency RF that can cause noise in radios and audio/video equipment. With it switching on and off in shunt mode (they probably don't use that term) this doesn't happen because it's so slow it's not in the right frequency ranges to make irritation RF noise.

Some controllers, btw, have a specific slow switch PWM mode for this.

Shunt control is a method that for the most part went out with old car regulators: they had an "on" Voltage and an "off" Voltage with a fairly wide range between them. It was the only way it could be done when "Voltage regulation" depended on switching V in to a gen between two levels via a current-controlled relay. So it would be on until Voltage reached a certain point, then shut off until it dropped below another point. As you can imagine this type of regulation is not very fine. Batteries don't like it much because in between they are discharging instead of charging. These auto regulators of old (also called "cut outs") have a certain amount of current purposefully 'leaked' to prevent too much discharge.

As far as deep cycle batteries are concerned they prefer to be held at Absorb Voltage with as little fluctuation as possible. There's no charging advantage to using shunt mode, and arguably a disadvantage.

Ok thank you all and Cariboocoot it make sence now was hoping to get just a lil more bk...... any ideas? cheap ideas? lol.

Cariboocoot

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Well, no.
On average a panel & controller put out about 77% of the rated Watts. That occurs under "normal" operating conditions with full insolation and maximum demand on the panels and an MPPT type controller.
The things that can improve it aren't so easy to control: greater insolation (higher elevation or reflection from snow for example), colder temperatures ... you can't really do much to squeeze more Watts out. This is why when we size arrays we do it like this: current desired * nominal system Voltage / array efficiency (that's the 77%). Sometimes a bit more "over-paneling" is desired.

But that only applies to an MPPT type controller. When using a PWM controller the 'extra' Voltage overhead between Vmp (@ Imp) and battery V doesn't get used except to compensate for V-drop. Usually this costs you about 10% efficiency if the Vmp is "right" for the system Voltage (as in 17.5 Vmp on a 12 Volt system). When you have a large discrepancy between battery Voltage and panel Vmp there's no way to recover that loss except with an MPPT controller. Unlike Voltage-based power sources PV (current-based power source) will not create current from Voltage differential.

Shawn-H

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Cariboocoot wrote: »

Well, no.
On average a panel & controller put out about 77% of the rated Watts. That occurs under "normal" operating conditions with full insolation and maximum demand on the panels and an MPPT type controller.
The things that can improve it aren't so easy to control: greater insolation (higher elevation or reflection from snow for example), colder temperatures ... you can't really do much to squeeze more Watts out. This is why when we size arrays we do it like this: current desired * nominal system Voltage / array efficiency (that's the 77%). Sometimes a bit more "over-paneling" is desired.

But that only applies to an MPPT type controller. When using a PWM controller the 'extra' Voltage overhead between Vmp (@ Imp) and battery V doesn't get used except to compensate for V-drop. Usually this costs you about 10% efficiency if the Vmp is "right" for the system Voltage (as in 17.5 Vmp on a 12 Volt system). When you have a large discrepancy between battery Voltage and panel Vmp there's no way to recover that loss except with an MPPT controller. Unlike Voltage-based power sources PV (current-based power source) will not create current from Voltage differential.

I think you misunderstood me. I was not referring to how much i would like to get out of my solar panels rated wattage. ... I was referring to what I would like to get from what I'm actually producing I'm getting less than half of the voltage that is coming into the charge controller.

Cariboocoot

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Shawn-H wrote: »

I think you misunderstood me. I was not referring to how much i would like to get out of my solar panels rated wattage. ... I was referring to what I would like to get from what I'm actually producing I'm getting less than half of the voltage that is coming into the charge controller.

That is what I just explained.

Output Voltage of a charge controller, regardless of type, is regulated to the charge set points which are what the battery needs. There is no point in raising that Voltage above the Absorb level: it is bad for the battery.

Input Voltage of a charge controller, regardless of type, is always higher than output Voltage: Vmp vs. battery Voltage. In the case of a panel not suited to the system Voltage it is a lot higher. You can not recover this power difference without an MPPT controller.

So with a Vmp at 17.5 or 30.5 you will not see higher than Absorb level (between 14.2 and 14.8 for 12 Volt systems) on the battery. Nor do you want to.

In fact if you skip the charge controller altogether the panel Voltage will be pulled down to battery level and the current will try to push the Voltage of the battery up to the panel Vmp. You do not want this to happen because it is very bad for the battery. Hence the reason why Equalization charging (elevated Voltage) is an occasional thing.

Photowhit

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Shawn-H wrote: »

...when read from the panel i get 29.3v @ 8.04A 236w (AS OF 10 MIN AGO) but when checked to the batteries from the controller it is 14.8v @ 8.63A 128W that is a shit ton of my total. i need that bk and don't have the $$$.$$ to blow for something i will not use on my 48v sys that i'm putting in in 8 moths.

This is just the charge controller doing it's job, it regulates the voltage gong into the battery, a PWM type of charge controller can't add any current from the excess voltage. it can only work with the amperage, at 14.8v I would assume it is out of 'bulk' and into absorption phase, indicating the battery bank is roughly 80% full, at this stage the amperage absorbed will slowly tapper off as the battery becomes fully charged, once fully charged or after being in absorption for a set amount of time the charge controller will further reduce the voltage to somewhere around 13.1volts. Lots of Good information in the FAQ's!

Shawn-H

Re: watt loss ts-60 pwm

Photowhit wrote: »

This is just the charge controller doing it's job, it regulates the voltage gong into the battery, a PWM type of charge controller can't add any current from the excess voltage. it can only work with the amperage, at 14.8v I would assume it is out of 'bulk' and into absorption phase, indicating the battery bank is roughly 80% full, at this stage the amperage absorbed will slowly tapper off as the battery becomes fully charged, once fully charged or after being in absorption for a set amount of time the charge controller will further reduce the voltage to somewhere around 13.1volts. Lots of Good information in the FAQ's!

Cariboocoot wrote: »

That is what I just explained.

Output Voltage of a charge controller, regardless of type, is regulated to the charge set points which are what the battery needs. There is no point in raising that Voltage above the Absorb level: it is bad for the battery.

Input Voltage of a charge controller, regardless of type, is always higher than output Voltage: Vmp vs. battery Voltage. In the case of a panel not suited to the system Voltage it is a lot higher. You can not recover this power difference without an MPPT controller.

So with a Vmp at 17.5 or 30.5 you will not see higher than Absorb level (between 14.2 and 14.8 for 12 Volt systems) on the battery. Nor do you want to.

In fact if you skip the charge controller altogether the panel Voltage will be pulled down to battery level and the current will try to push the Voltage of the battery up to the panel Vmp. You do not want this to happen because it is very bad for the battery. Hence the reason why Equalization charging (elevated Voltage) is an occasional thing.

thank you all you have been so so much help off to read more... thank you Photowhit for the link.