WRFP399 ✭✭

From the LoRa monitor what I can see is a fully charged battery during the day and held at a float voltage of 13.6, drops to about 12.95-12.9 volts over the course of the evening/morning with a draw of about 80mA. The sun comes up and the draw slowly tapers off and starts into a net positive. Such as today, I watched it…

Just some more follow up. It is now Aug 8th 2023. It is still up and running. I took some readings from it a few days ago. I also added a LoRa radio with an INA260 current and voltage monitor so I can now see the real time (updates every 15 minutes) voltage and currant going to/from the battery at will while not having to…

Welp. I didn't get back to it before we got snowed in but we made it past winter solstice and we have been up 100% of the time this year.

Just figured I would swing in with an update. The repeater has been up and running with no down time all summer. Which is to be expected. I will say that we have had basically 2 months of clouds. July and Aug, while lots of daytime hours, were all cloud covered and/or raining. Today we had about 4 hours of sunlight before…

I finally got the batter out of the ground. Still has some ice on it, which I expected, but the voltage was at 12.01 volts. It held that voltage under a small load. After a close inspection it appears the wire leading to the controller failed internally. Charged it up and it seems to be fine. Just a small additional…

Yeah. She is froze. Voltage drops to .45 with the small 25 mA load. Battery is dead dead. EDIT: The only think I don't understand is how it froze....It was making power up until it shut down. When it shut down it was under a load. So if it had not been frozen when the load was shut down the voltage shouldn't really have…

Finally got to the repeater. Solar controller was off as I suspected. As soon as I hook up a fresh battery it comes alive. With no load the battery shows 7.5 volts. I attempted to jump it up to a higher voltage to see if she would at least take some kinda charge but it doesn't appear to want to take much, if any current…

I did not run any kind of specific capacity test. I just hooked up a light bulb that pulled .5 amp to see if it would light and it did. I figured if it was frozen there would be little to no electrical activity?

Side note on freezing. Tried as a might I could not get an AGM to freeze on me. I dragged one down to a standing voltage of less than 9.0 volts and it would not freeze up in sub zero temperatures after several days of exposure. I am not saying it won't happen, just I couldn't get it to in my tests. Either way I chose 11.8…

So I set up some parameters for daily consumption as follows: 10 min of transmission time a day, 17 hours and 50 min of standby and 6 hours off. This uses 29.64 watts/hours of power. The transmission times is very conservative to reflect the solar power issues in the dead of winter here. Outside of December transmission…

Thank you. I set EQ at 0 which disables it. I contacted Epever to try and see what difference between discharge limit and low voltage cut off is. The low voltage cutoff removes the load but I don't know what happens before and after the discharge limit.

Mppt was a side effect of getting a programmable controller but running the panels in series is definitely something to consider now. Also it looks like it does only consume 13 mA when the load is turned off. Even with no real load attached having the load "on" pulls about 10 mA. Here is a screen shot of the setting I…

This is it running with no load and solar input.

Welp. The Epever seems to work alot better. It's uses 22-25 mA when running. Hooked to my 30 watt test panel sitting on my deck it is showing that about 50 mA are being made from the overcast and snowing skies. This is it running with no load and no solar.

If I had been paying closer attention I would have just ordered this instead of another China controller. Oh well. https://www.solar-electric.com/ss-6l.html

I can tolerate the system going down in the winter a few times. I saw that as the nature of the beast being I wanted to limit its size and I am in Anchorage, Alaska. What really triggered this post was trying to do was cross check my theory. Again thank you for walking through what is probably super basic knowledge with…

Just looking over your suggestions and if I understand it correct the calculations show I would need a 426 watt array to ensure full charge the battery everyday after consuming 70 WH of power from the battery? That is based on a half hour average of solar correct? There is no way I can create that large of an array for…

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. I am grateful for the shared knowledge. The actual use of the repeater can be pretty low. It's primary purpose was for friends and family back up communication when the cell networks go down. In the 2018 Earthquake we were without comms for nearly the whole day. It's use has…

Hiking an 80 amp hour battery up that mountain would be quite the endeavor. The battery I used is: https://www.batteriesplus.com/productdetails/slaa12=35c The charge controller states its rated for -20 C to +60 C. I guess from a technical standpoint that is only -4 degrees F. So I am outside it's bounds. I guess this is…

After 36 hours in a freezer at 0 degrees the small SLA test battery was reading 8.5 volts while running the test charge controller. When disconnected and let to settle for about 10 minutes it read 10.2 volts. We have overcast skies with some back light lighter clouds from the sun in one part. I took the 30 watt panel…