Reply To: Battery question, need advice

[retired profile of WrethaOffGrid]

Again 12vman, your wisdom and input are very appreciated, I also keep my batteries, charge controller and inverter inside my living quarters, the only part that is outside are the solar panels, I didn’t consider the temps, just the fact that I wanted to know what was going on with my system at all times, I didn’t want things out of sight (out of mind), it keeps me in the loop and stops potential problems much quicker. I don’t worry about the “dangers” of having the batteries and such inside, the sky castle is not tight, and our batteries are kept in such a way that if there was a leak, the liquid would be contained, they are also kept away from flame or anything that could spark. Now for what it’s worth, we don’t try terribly hard to keep the sky castle warm in the winter, we keep things well above freezing though, the nights might get down into the 40s F and the days usually get into the 50-60 F range.

I didn’t know what a thermistor was so I looked it up, I can assure you we have no such device on our system. My charge controller is a C35. As far as the inverter is concerned, for now I have no idea what is causing it to do that, randomly going off, I will say that it has only done this during this last winter, it has never done it before, it seems to only happen during the day when things are charging or fully charged, I don’t ever recall it happening at night, one strange time it almost always happened (again only during the day) was when the fridge would shut OFF (not coming on) the inverter would shut off for 5-10 seconds then come back on, don’t know if that would give you a hint about something or not…

This doesn’t happen everyday, I’d say maybe a few days a week, and it would only shut off for 5-10 seconds then come right back on, it happens when things are running, or when nothing is on.

About a week ago, our fridge smoked on us and quit working, it was used when we got it so it could be that it was its time to die, or it could be the inverter had something to do with it. I have another fridge lined up to replace it, but I don’t want to plug it up until I find out more about what is going on, I plan on breaking down both of my inverters, cleaning them well, then I will swap the two, putting the (hopefully) good one on my main system.

I’m in no hurry though, I hope to get to Sam’s in the next couple of weeks (it’s a 3 hour drive) to get those batteries, that’s when I’ll take everything inside the sky castle apart and re-do everything.

I did attach a gadget to my batteries, it’s one of those desulfators, sometime after that is when my inverter started acting up, I thought it might be caused by the desulfator but when I disconnected it, the inverter continued acting up, you can read about it herehttps://offgriddev.wpengine.com/2014/02/01/battery-desulfator-review-part/
I don’t believe the desulfator hurt anything, I had another one hooked up to my secondary setup on the back deck and it didn’t happen out there, I also swapped desulfators and the same thing happened inside. I do not have the desulfator hooked up on my inside system, but still have the one working outside.

Wretha