Updating the Solar System Pt 4

 Finishing off the Update

Here's where I am at the moment, the drawing includes the 3rd panel that has not yet arrived.

By chance, we watched a Pacific Yacht Systems video that showed the need for a Fuze between the Charger and the Battery. As mentioned in an earlier post, the boat came with wires from the charger to the battery but are incorrectly 12awg and 14awg but should be 10awg. My plan is to trace the wires from the Charger to their final connection to the battery (might be via a fuse or breaker and, no surprise, they may change cable size and color.) I'll replace them with 10awg Black and 10awg Red cables, while at it, I'll add a breaker between the charger and breaker on the +ve line.

Update Wednesday September 2nd 2020

The panel arrived on Friday, took it down to the boat today and installed it. Went pretty well except that I want to change the way the front edge is attached to the bimini, that'll happen on Thursday. 

But today we saw the benefit of the new panel. The Sun was partially obscured by the trees at the dock, even then we saw the power rise to 60watts compared to just 10watts without the new panel. Probably because the port side (old) panel was almost entirely in the tree shade.

The Victron controller keeps track for the past 30 days, I'll make a habit of sharing the data in a spreadsheet. the spreadsheet below shows each month of data since the install Move to the bottom of the page to see the Month Tabs.