Hello guys, I am new to the solar system, I currently live in a van and I have two solar panels and two AGM batteries from Renogy. I use their new 1000W 12 volt pure sine wave inverter with power saving mode and a 20 AMP MPPT charge controller.
When I first got them, obviously working fine, I notice I was getting more voltage than W so I bought something called “Branch Connector Y in pair MMF + FFM” for parallel connection for my 2 solar panels. I look more information into it and they said I need this to get my solar in parallel and get more energy to charge my batteries. Is that right?
I used the batteries from time to time (at that moment I wasn’t living in the van yet) and they charged normally, but after a couple of weeks I notice that my batteries were not staying charged, it was so bad that it drain almost completely. I decided to turn off my inverter and not use the batteries. I did that, it took around 2 months to get to 50% charged. I also want to say that I live in Mass and this was happening between October and November so it was most of the time cloudy during the time I turn off my inverter.
I notice that turning off my inverter helps the battery charge. Now for the past 3 weeks I been getting not so bad weather, I have more sunny days then I though and somedays it says is 100% charged but as soon as I connect my ipad, my iphone or switch it goes from 100 to 90 to 70 to 66 or 61 and it stays like that for a while. I have charged my ipad or switch in 61 for an hour or more and it stays the same but my batteries are never actually charged 70 to 100%. I even had time where my batteries were 51% or 56%.
So I explain what I could here, honestly I know nothing about solar, batteries, wiring. I did my best looking up videos, watching them more than 10 times, going back to my system and checking if I did everything right but still I just can’t figure out if I am doing something wrong or bought something that doesn’t go together.. PLEASE help me understand this, I don’t know the terms or names of a lot of this things so explain it to me as if I was a child because seems like that’s the only way for me to get it.
Oh and I forgot to say that I end up just using one battery to see if the solar/sun was not enough to charge two batteries. I did this a week ago and still is not charging all the way, it stays in the 60’s.
I apologize for my bad English, I am trying to get better at it.
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