Long time no see...we've had a lot of financial and family stuff going on.
However, especially on seeing Grum's and TinMan's recent vids, I wondered if folks might have some advice about my present solar and battery set up.
About 5 or 6 years back, I bought 2x 1lb bags of solar bits...solar panel pieces with some actual full sized cells. Those 7 cells went on the back of an old mirror and sat around. Instead, I was using the other bits to make 1A 18V panels.
Fast forward to a month or so back and I bought a 100W DC/DC converter...ideal for hopefully boosting the 4V output at 8A to something useful for a car battery.
It turns out that the output is very confusing !
As seen in the pics below, at 17.75V it's putting out apparently over 4A
So let's see....each cell is 0.55V and each when new was rated for 8A = 4.4W per cell
4.4 x 7 = 30.8W
It should be a 30W panel, then after the booster should maybe leave a 23W or similar setup, able to charge a 12V car battery.
However, as corroborated with a Uni-T multimeter, the actual wattage coming out is apparently more like 75W
Presumably the switching frequency is upsetting both meters.
Anyhow - decent wattage whatever it truly is, well past the usual combined 10W or so from the other broken bits panels, am quite delighted with it.
But am not delighted with the Alum converted car batteries and they are what i'm looking for advice about.
Both batts are former failures from our car. 1 was struck by lightning and the other likely didn't do much better in its former life.
Both used to charge to approx 11.5V
The lightning one sits at 5V and refuses to budge.
The other has very slowly gained from 5V to 9.5V over the past few days of charging on this panel.
It'll top out at about 11.5V and then drops back by the next morning, to be about 1/2V higher than the day before.
I suppose it would be best to scrap the very very bad one.
Would you suggest Bedini'ing the other ? sharp spikes to try and bring back the possibly knacked out cells ?
A top down inspection of the batt cells seem to show them to be quite clean, but years have passed of no use.
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Topic: Solar & batt questions about present set up (Read 2386 times)
