Arcticdude
Top Poster
That diagram is very similar to my main system. What I've been having problems with is the system for the chicken coop. It has one 110 watt solar panel, charge controller, 12 volt deep cycle battery and 400 watt inverter. Simple enough, right? I think I finally figured out what was wrong, almost embarrassed to admit it out loud. The battery I'm using has two posts for positive and two for negative, one large post for battery cables and one small one for accessories. I attached the wire from the charge controller to the small posts, then I attached the inverter to the same posts. Then when I attached the inverter to the large terminal it began to work as designed.Very odd? Very difficult to diagnose what's going on from here in Australia too of course lol. I'll tell you one thing I do, I learnt this from an electronics technician. Whenever I build a system I first draw it out on paper, I like faint graph paper for the plan. It's a circuit diagram basically and it lets me get a feel for what's going where and the correct order of things. Later I leave it near or with the construction so I can refer back to it in the future. It's amazing how much a project resembles a pile of spaghetti when you remove the cover 2 years later.
There are some basic conventions to these diagrams too, that aid in making them intelligible.
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Or a sort of flow chart even, like this.
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