Easy Solar Power for #vanlife and Off-grid RV Dwellers: Renogy DC to DC Charger w/ MPPT

So today we are going to test and review a 50 amp DC battery

charger

with MPPT, so this just simplifies your life if you are mounting a

solar

power

system on a vehicle like a truck or an RV, so Normally it will have a starter battery and you will have a

solar

battery or your coach battery and this is charged with the alternator and this is charged with the solar panels. Well, what it does is it goes between the three systems, you connect the batteries of the solar panel coach and the starter. battery of your vehicle and this will modulate the

power

between all of them and to make this as simple to understand as possible, this unit here replaces a traditional DC to DC battery

charger

and an MPPT, so if you just combine these two, This is what you get and what's crazy is that this can handle six hundred and sixty watts of power from the solar panel and six hundred and sixty watts coming from the alternator, so this can put out some serious power.

I'm just talking about the cost savings compared to purchasing an MPPT and a DC to DC battery. The charger makes it super cheap and great for truck and RV

dwellers

but what I want to know is how well it works because there are a lot of problems that could occur when designing this type of system in a big common complaint I heard from a lot people with DC and DC battery chargers is that this one doesn't detect voltage, so if you buy like 400 or 500 bucks, it will tell you when the alternator is on, it will turn itself on and start charging.

This one doesn't work. This way you have a wire input from the ignition circuit, so you have to get like 13 or 14 volts or whatever and we'll say, "Okay, now I'm going to turn it on and then it'll start charging your solar battery" for a lot of people. that they don't understand it. The power circuits and how to connect them get very confused and cannot do the configuration of these IP switches. Personally, I think this was very simple and worked perfectly for me, but I've heard a lot of people complain, so what do I do? I'm curious how

easy

this unit will be, so yeah, we'll hook it up to these two battle burners, this will be our starter battery and this will be our solar battery and we'll see what happens when we hook it up.

So first we have four screws to remove these covers, another one of the covers, we have these terminals, so we have a pv+ that will connect to the positive wire of your solar panel assembly. We have a positive from the alternator that will connect to the starter battery. or the positive of your alternator and then we have a positive output, so this will go to the positive of the solar battery bank and then this is negative, this will go to all the negatives for all of these power sources and on the side we have a port communication we have a BTS for the temperature sensor we have a BVS which is a battery voltage sampling so it tells the unit what the battery voltage is directly from the battery and then we have power on if it has a smart alternator and you want to be able to turn it. it turns on manually or something that's where you do it and then you have some lights on the front to tell you what's going on and on the back we have a huge heat sink and after reading the manual I realized it has a relay sensitive to the voltage within it. one doesn't so it's nice that this actually has a voltage sensitive relay in the price compared to Stirling in red arc that's really nice but overall it's super simple it only has a couple of bolts and because the goal of This unit is charge. the solar battery in several ways we're going to add an ant hill between the Battleborn in this unit so we can see how much power is going into the Battleborn and I can tell you right now that the number one reason people get it wrong when installing this doesn't involve use the proper gauge wire at various connection points, so this battery will be very far away from this battery, so measure and find out what size gauge wire you need to connect all of this for this test.

I'm going to use six and four gauge pure copper welding wire. Something I just noticed is that these studs are huge and you can fit three or four huge terminals in here which is really nice, so after reading the manual this unit will activate. Any voltage on the starter battery above thirteen point two volts will start charging the solar battery, but if it is below twelve point seven it will turn it off and solar charging will be activated if the solar input voltage is above fifth of ten volts. I have bad news so the maximum solar input voltage is 25 volts this is an MPPT usually with the ones I like 82 like 200 volts this is only 25 volts which means for anyone who use them in a vehicle mounted system you will have to put all your panels together in parallel and the limit for most mc4 connections for those parallel connections on your roof with tap adapters will be I think 25, 20 or 30 amps , so when you connect your solar panels you need to check how many amps they are dropping and you are probably going to use ten or even eight gauge wires to bring all those amps to this unit and now it is fully connected so we have a positive wire of the solar battery and then we have a negative cable.

The wire goes to the common negative and then the negative wire goes to the alternator or the starter battery and then a positive goes down to the alternator positive so all we have to do is add voltage on this side and it will start sending power to this battery. I don't know what the state of charge of these batteries is, so we could be in for a surprise. Oh, we have twelve point six, so this battery is dead. We have twelve point eight, so I need to load this up to thirteen points. two and then once it reaches that threshold, it will start charging this battery.

I'm glad they're out of stock because then I can test when it reaches it and we can look at the voltage and everything, and I'm pretty impatient, so we're going to use an all-in-one charger to charge this starter battery, so now we're charging the battery. starter and check the voltage. We have thirteen point zero seven and we have a red light on the alternator and what is crazy is that it has already started charging, we are at thirteen point eight amps going through this unit. Actually, what would be smart to do is disconnect the solar battery for now because I don't want them to charge together.

I want this one to be extremely discharged. and this one needs to be fully charged to see how much power we can run through this unit and I want to see what happens if I disconnect one of the batteries so now we disconnect the battery and we're not pushing anything so now my charger is just charging the battery and then we will wait until the voltage increases and then we will connect the other battery. What's crazy is that it actually trickles charges the starter battery when it's fully charged with solar, so it's awesome if you have a vehicle and storage and you have solar panels on the roof, you can leave it there and this will take care of both batteries, that's really good.

I should have reviewed this months ago. This is really cool, but keep in mind if you have For a smart alternator you need to connect the ignition cable, so if you have a normal old tire you don't have to do anything, everything is automatic, you just connect the cables to the batteries and that's it, Guys, it was loaded and everything. all day so let's see what voltage we have fourteen point five nine so we're just going to plug this negative in and see how many amps we can push through this 51 amps so it's rated for 50 amps but we're pushing 51, so I press. 50 amps at first but as they even out the amperage goes down and you guys can hear a cooling fan in the background and that's the battery charger that's connected to the starter battery so as it goes down the battery charger increases the amperage and charges faster and faster to compensate for how much of this battery is consumed and to make this fun we are going to add 20 volts to the input of the solar panel and see what happens so now we have 24 volts at 5 amps coming from our power supply and look at the solar panel the light is illuminated so look at this guys this light just turned on and now it is charging with solar energy or it would be solar if it was a solar panel, but now it's nighttime so we're just going to use this so I have thirteen point three volts at 35 amps so 465 watts are going to the solar battery and 100 watts are coming from our power supply or our power system fake solar and then the rest comes from this battery and the battery charger connected to it.

Also add, although it is preferable to have the battery voltage sense wires connected right here, these wires are very thick and it is a very short run, so it is fine for me to just connect them all together this way, but when I install, read the manual and add those. cables to the BVS that will help with charging so that you have a precise voltage of the batteries so that it can be charged properly but yes it works it's very

easy

guys just plug it in and boom it works and if this starter battery had a higher voltage high. and we actually had an alternator that could push over 50 amps, we could push 50 amps through this continuously and the heat sink on the back is getting really hot right now so it's been a few hours and it's gone down to 8 amps. so it will slowly drop to zero as these two batteries become equal in voltage.

Now I finally learned how to change the battery type indicator because it wasn't actually in the manual and I found an instructional video from Renergie, so check this out, you have a little button that you can access with a paper clip or a small pointed tool, it What you want to do is press this little button inside the hole and then this light color will change and the color of the light will correspond to various types of battery, so lithium we want to have it with blue light and now that it's blue it's set up and it will charge a lithium iron phosphate battery with an appropriate charge profile if you want to use another type of battery read the manual and it will show you the different types in which color of light corresponds to each one and that confused me.

I couldn't find the information anywhere but they had a little button there guys and after playing with it a bit and reading the manual I finally figured out what all these lights mean and what they do, first we have the alternator light and When the starter battery is charging and the alternator is charging it, this will give you a solid red light when flashing, which means the starter battery is slowly charging. by solar energy when it is off like it is now, that means this battery is not charging and nothing happens. The next charge indicator is the LED on the solar panel and this is another red LED and when we have power here we will have a solid light.

The massive charge light there are quite a few flashing variations that will tell you if it is in float mode or boost mode and when this light is off it means it is not charging at all, the next light is the battery indicator for the solar battery or what is connected here and when it is green it means the battery is full and then if it is yellow it means the battery voltage is normal but if it has red and it is on or there is a slow or faceted flashing that means you have a situation of over or under voltage and this is the battery type indicator so use the button here to change it like we mentioned before and if you have a sealed lead acid battery, you want it to be green if you have a gel one. battery you want it to be yellow and if you have a flooded battery you want it to be red and then if you have a lithium one like we have now you want it to be blue and then white means debug and I'm not sure what that actually means I couldn't find that's in the manual, but if you just change this little setting with this button here, you can program which battery you have for the next test.

We have connected a pure sine wave inverter with a pure copper wire to the solar battery and we are going to charge this battery and we are going to see how many amps will pass through this unit at this time. I have the solar hooked up and a battery charger on the starter battery so this will mimic a vehicle going down the road with solar power available and alternator power available and right now it's already pulling 25 amps so yeah , let's add a load and see what happens and we're pushing 27 amps at 13 volts and that's interesting because I have a 20 amp. charger connected right now and this mimics five to seven amps at 12 volts after losses and it's crazy because we're pushing exactly that amount so let's turn off one of these and see what happens.

Look at that now we only have eighteen point eight. amps now let's unplug the charger and the battery indicator light is flashing red and that's an over discharge or low voltage battery situation so I figured out why this was going off it's because this Battleborn can only handle a 100 amp discharge rate and nowsame with this. 1500 watt load we are pushing more than this can handle so unplug this and the inverter that's why they both turn off at the same time so this is probably the worst we could test so let's add the loader and let's try to run it.

This load, although this battery cannot handle it, if the charge rate exceeds this, it helps to be supported by 30 amps or so, it should be able to power this heat gun, but we are really pushing this to the limit now. The battery charger is on and the solar panel is on and we have 27 amps so 27 plus 100 of this so 127 amps should be able to power this so we'll add a wattmeter and see how many watts it actually draws so they are 1,400 and 40 and then we also have to think that this loses 10% so we need to add another 150 watts so this actually exceeds the maximum load of this and this We will still power it for a while but yes we are pushing at a hundred watts or more and I think it would be pretty boring if you just reduced the load, but we know that you can actually run a load that exceeds the limits. of our equipment and it will turn off the inverter turns off and it will turn off and you can see the red light flashes and then it will come back on when it starts charging again what I like about it is that it doesn't matter how much I screw it up , it turns on by itself, look, it's still charging, so this is really beginner friendly, people who don't want to mess with this or go in here and change the settings, they just plug it in and it's pretty much done with something else.

What I want to point out is that this is a true MPPT because the working voltage on the input side does not decrease if this were a switching regulator, it would actually decrease and they wouldn't lie, Renergie isn't going to lie, they are responsible for it. their actions, if a person found out that they were selling a fake MPPT it would be all over the reviews and no one would buy from them, it's so funny because there are a couple of youtubers that posted videos of fake MPP t-shirts and they obviously weren't on PPT it's just based on the weight and the size and everyone is scared now that they think that a fake PPT is like the possibility of a fake MPPT is very rare and it is so easy to detect, you guys should not worry. that, especially from a reputable distributor or seller, you will never come across that, but many people always want to ask who really is MPPT and you can tell by the panel's operating voltage, so if you connect your panels to a regulator switching will only be 12 volts.

I actually made another video about this, but I need to cover that again because I'm sure people will ask, so now let's talk about whether you should really buy this unit. I really like it, it's very simple and if you press. If it exceeds its limits it will restart itself, it is easy to program and everything works and generates a lot of power. The only thing I don't like is that the PV input, the voltage is very low, which means that you will have to put a lot of 12 volt panels in parallel and you can exceed the current limitations of the mc4 adapters or those little connectors that you use.

You connect all your solar panels, so what I'm going to do is add a custom page to my website just for this unit and I'm going to draw some schematics and show you the maximum size of the solar array, which will be around 400 watts, and then I will suggest what adapters to use so that everything works well together and is safe, but I really like the system, there are also several ways to connect it and I am going to put different schematics because you can use the common ground and bond this to the chassis and then do that everything else is tied to the chassis with the ground and then you just have things like a red wire, a red wire and then a red wire that goes to the solar panels, so I'll post it all on the website, but yeah, really I like this unit, there hasn't been a single thing I don't like, it's simple, it's easy to use and it really works and it's powerful, so I'm very excited.

I was actually scared because I saw the ignition input and thought it would be for traditional alternators, but that's only for smart alternators, so it's very different than the other Rena G DCs. On DC to DC chargers it's all sensing of voltage and you don't have to do anything, you just connect with a couple of cables and that's it, also on the new page we will talk about the size of cables that they say you can use four or six gauge. I'm going to recommend everyone right now to use absolutely safe four gauge copper wire and yes, I think the life of the vans and the RV crowd is going to eat them up.

I think the reason no one uses them is because they are scared and the manual doesn't say everything in simplistic terms like changing the battery type, but now that we have this video and I know it works and it's very simple and we'll have a schematic, I think a lot of people will buy it. These and I like this system so much that I built a small example system and I will have high definition images available on my website, so this is just a 1500 watt inverter, these will be the solar battery bus bar circuit breakers and DC power. -dc inside PPT I want people to know how to build it safely, so I will have high quality UL listed marine grade circuit breakers on the website.

I will also tell you what size cable to use and where these cables go. It's a pretty simple and straightforward process, but if you see it on a dashboard it makes it a lot easier because you know there's a huge mass of cables on my desk. Some people may be scared, but if you look at it like this, it just trips a bus bar breaker. to the inverter and then two wires to this unit and then two wires to the solar panel and then a single four gauge wire that goes to your starting battery or your alternator and then ground everything, then you're almost done so check Visit the website and I hope this makes it as easy as possible because this is very interesting and very easy to use so yeah I hope you like this video and I will talk to you soon bye.