Nov 20, 2008 05:59 am
Re: Bogart Trimetric and MK 105ah AGM batteries
You know how these product manuals are always saying; "Be sure to carefully read and understand this manual before attempting to..." well its doubly true of some manuals. A lot of these product manuals take, I think, a certain amount of deductive reasoning skills. Certain areas of these manuals are like camouflaged, you have to look for whats not there to see what is there. You get a sense of subterfuge. Some manuals, I wonder if the person who wrote the manual and drew the diagrams, every actually had to follow the manual and preform the tasks.
I have a Tri-Metric 2020. Have had two actually. First was taken out by a surge, long story. Whats frustrating is once you have it all figured out and programed, in the end, you'll never need to know that stuff again. Unless of course you have need of another one or replacing one, but by then it could all be forgotten.
Even after all of that I have to say, the Bogart, Tri-Metric 2020 is a damn good monitor! Mine has worked flawlessly for years. It would be my recommendation to anybody starting up a PV system. You made a good choice.
It depends, where the shunt goes I mean, on what you want to know about your system. If you want know the total amphours in and out of your battery bank then the shunt is the "last link" between ALL negative leads and the only negative lead to the battery bank.
If you want to know just PV input to the battery, go across shunt to battery with PV negative only. After charge controll, not before.
Its the same with anything else you may want to know about individually. Use only that line or loads negative.
Only those negatives that go across the shunt to battery negative will the monitor read in and/or out.
Personally, I want to know all amps in and out of my battery bank, so I went across the shunt with all negative leads.
If there are a lot of negatives in your system, it helps to use a splice block.
!!WARNING!! If you have multiple negative leads in your system going to shunt, you must use the correct wire size to continue negative from the shunt to the battery negative post. Example: you may have a total of; 3 - #4 and 1 - #2/0 negative leads going to shunt but you want to use one wire from shunt to battery negative post. You will need to know the sum of the amperage ratings of the pre-shunt wires, to properly size the one post-shunt wire.
I confused myself on that one. I am starting gain some respect for those people that write the manuals, what with liabilities being a major concern and all. Does the above warning make sense to anyone else? Can anyone write this in a better way? Of course diagrams would help.
As for the set points.
1 - 14.4 sounds high for sealed AGM's. Thats sounds more like a high limit for flooded cell lead acid. I would set that the same as the high limit on your charge controller for those sealed AGM's. Thats 13 something right? Go with battery manufatures suggestions. To high a setting on the charge controller could "boil away" the electrolytes.
2 - Yes. You would only use this if you wanted to judge amp hours in/out as a full charge criteria. Voltage criteria will do nicely though in most cases.
3 - Yes.
