solar battery charger

[dc095]

does anyone here use a solar battery charger. If so does it harm the electronics? I have a fishfinder on my boat worked good till about 2 weeks after i put the charger on it. Now it just makes a loud steady bbep when i turn it on. Any ideas.Thanks, DENNY

 

[Texasmark]

Re: solar battery charger

Do you know if your solar battery charger is doing you any good. I would think that it would take a lot of cells to do some serious battery charging....trickle charge sustaining yes, charging a somewhat discharged battery???????? Possibly the beep is just a warning that the battery voltage is low. Ask the mfgr of the finder.

Mark

 

[dc095]

Re: solar battery charger

thanks Mark, its a trickie charger,I leave it hooked up all the time. i will check voltage next time at the boat. It seems to have a full charge all the time. Just wonder about the fishfinder.

 

[bruceb58]

Re: solar battery charger

No effect at all.

 

[H20Rat]

Re: solar battery charger

most of the cheap solar chargers work marginal at best, and often will end up with the diode failing. Once that goes out, they will discharge your battery even better than they will charge it.

 

[tschmidty]

Re: solar battery charger

Diode could be bad as said and it will drain your battery at that point. If it's new probably not but you never know.

 

[bruceb58]

Re: solar battery charger

Diodes rarely fail with a short. They usually fail going open so discharging won't be a problem typically except for the fact that it is no longer charging with the open diode.

 

[Kaplooi]

Re: solar battery charger

Are we talking about one of those little 5watt panels with an on off regulator or a bigger panel with a dedicated charge controller? If your system is big enough to benefit from one I'd highly recommend a decent charge controller. It's used primarily to protect the panel from the battery as well as to improve the quality and type of charging rather than to protect the components attached to the battery. I use a 68W Unisolar PVL68 thin film panel to keep my trolling motor battery topped up while camping and use a small charge controller (Morningstar Sunguard SG4) sized to match the panel's capacity. At that output you actually have a usable amount of electricity given you can recover hundred of watts on a sunny day. It takes all of 6mA to run the controller and it offers true pulse width modulation charging. During daylight hours it's basically similar to a 'smart' charger like a battery tender given that it does high amperage bulk charging when the battery is at lower voltages and switches to PWM at higher voltages to build and maintain a high state of charge. You could leave it plugged in day and night since reverse current protection is built in. It's doubtful your trickle charger is able to maintain a high state of charge. It's common for cheaper models with on/off regulators to only be capable of maintaining a 50-60% state of charge. A good PWM controller should be capable of 90-95%.