Why you shouldn’t use a charge controller!

Everywhere, the solar enthusiasts all say “Thou shalt use a charge controller” then all the parrots come out and repeat this. At the first hint of a problem with one where it’s clearly from China more parrots come out “should not have bought one from China” while neglecting the fact that all the circuits for every charge controller available in the USA is actually made in China.

The problem with these funky charge controllers is they’re all designed to be used in static installations, not in vehicles. Thus, they need the battery to be connected via two wires, the appliances to be connected by two wires and the solar panels to be connected via two wires. What a Royal pain in the rump that is! In a vehicle the body can be used as a common wire (usually the negative wire) in order to save a ton on expensive electrical wires and a ton of time on installation.

The charge controllers all claim to have “algorithms” or some such total fiction. The fact is with a solar panel, you connect it to the battery and it puts power into the battery as long as the sun is shining brightly enough that there’s more power from the panel than in the battery. A simple diode stops the battery blowing power into the solar panel to blow it up when the charge from the panel gets too low.

At the moment because I don’t currently have the right stuff to do this without one of those ludicrous charge controllers I’m having to play by the perverted rules of the Chinese. I’ve tried using the body as the ground and connecting the battery ground and the appliance ground to the body but the charge controller is not happy about it. I keep seeing a warning symbol. I can’t wait to get rid of that junk charge controller. None of the others I have are any different. They’re all equally awful.

What is needed to get round all this nonsense is two separate units. Firstly an overcharge controller such as the one used on a car battery. Secondly a simple battery protector that switches the power off when the voltage gets too low. The overcharge controller seems also to be called a voltage regulator. The battery protector seems to be called a low voltage disconnect.

For the moment I’m putting in two battery cables and they will go straight to the charge controller. I’ll have to make the body negative from the charge controller appliance negative and put the positive through the wiring. It’s a massive and heinous problem due totally to the idiotic way in which these cheap-ass all-in-one units are made. Eventually I’ll go with two separate units and strip out or retask my excess cable.

I spent a few minutes or more like 30 squeezing my twin battery cables into some of Harbor Freight’s cable wrap. I’ve probably got way more than I can ever hope to use but at the very least it’s something toward progress on the bus. Can I say now just how much I detest rolling around in the dirt, underneath my bus? I do it but only because it has got to be done. In fact this whole bus building thing is driven by the goal, not by the process.

By the time the daylight ran away, I had two bundles of cables almost completely installed. One goes from the battery to the charge controller (or will when I drill a hole in the floor and pass it through. That needs connections made to the battery that I shan’t make til I’m ready to power everything. The other is a set of cables I’d started to install weeks ago and hadn’t had time to complete. I’d needed to extend the one pair of cables and so today I extended them and popped most of it in cable wrap. I ran out of wrap, sadly. I’ll have to see about getting more later.