I worked on energy aboard today. I noticed that despite it being a slightly overcast day, the periods of sunshine that did break through weren’t charging the battery as much as I expected and after checking a bit I looked at my MPPT charge panel and two of the panels weren’t blinking slowly to indicate that they were charging. I hadn’t labelled any of the controllers so didn’t know which panels they represented, so first did a bit of sleuthing to find out which ones were connected where (and labelled them accordingly). The forward port panel seemed not to be putting out any power, and I was afraid that the wiring might have chafed and removed the headliner in the port cabin to check. This was a bigger task, but when I did get to the wiring it was in order; then I removed the fuse from the MPPT controller in question and upon re-inserting it the panel was once again charging the battery bank. I’ll have to keep an eye on this in the next days.
I played around with the Maxim 1-Wire thermometers and the Arduino so that I could measure the temperatures in the fridge and freezer, who I felt were still drawing extraordinary amounts of power. I still cannot figure out what mode either of the two systems is programmed in and since I cannot get the controller hardware for the PC connection from the manufacturer despite many attempts I’m thinking about just programming the Arduino to do this by itself.
 |