Adding Solar to 21RBS

[Merlin]

Looks and sounds great. It's almost like you know what you're doing. 

Let us know how that works for you 

[tt2retire]

So far the solar installation has been working great. Worst case was when visiting the Redwoods np in January where we had lots of rain and our batteries got down to 72% SOC.

Just added another way to charge.

I added a DC2DC (victron orion 12/12-30) charger for those days when I'm too shaded or not enough sun light. I don't yet have the added cables in my TV, but I made a little adapter so I can temporarily hook up to the anderson plug on the tongue with my jumper cables.

Still have room left for an inverter, but that will happen when my current FLA batteries (trojan tr-105 225AH) get replaced with lithium a couple of years down the road.

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[DavidM]

Do you plan to use pin 4 of the 7 pin connector on your TV to supply the DC2DC charger, or run a separate cable all the way to the TV's batteries.  Most TV's use a 10 gauge cable protected by a 30A dash fuse for pin 4. A bit of a voltage drop with #10, about 0.7V but of course the DC2DC charger takes care of that.

David

[tt2retire]

I'm running separate wires (through recommended 60A fuse & solenoid) from the TV battery to the rear bumper where I'll install the anderson plug (with cover) to match the one I installed on the trailer tongue.

I'll leave the 7-pin wiring as is, but I may pass its aux-12V wire (pin 4) through the new solenoid in the engine compartment as well so I don't have to remember to disconnect the 7-pin if I'm going to be parked for a while.

I had two sets of 4 awg wires left over from my solar installation (25ft & 15ft) so I used one on my trailer installation and will use the other on my TV. The victron orion charger is known to get warm, and in fact it has pretty big heat sinks on its underside. By minimizing the cable voltage drop I'm hopeful that the orion will not have to work so hard and thus not produce as much heat.

If I can avoid installing a thermostatically controlled cooling fan for the pass through storage area, especially if I later install an inverter in the open space between the solar charge controllers and the DC2DC charge controller, I'll have less installation work to do in the future.

Ed...

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