I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.
I have 2 identical 6V 5ah batteries (less than a month old) wired in series (to produce 12V). I connected them to a new charge controller which kills the load until battery charge reaches 12.6V. There is no load (yet) on the batteries and yesterday I read 12.49V, but after a nice sunny day today the reading is 12.28V… so I’m going in the wrong direction.
I checked and the solar panel is producing current, and everything seems to be wired correctly to the charge controller.
I need 12V for my system so I cannot charge the batteries seperately or in parallel.
Any thoughts?
Upon further investigation I realize the solar panel I’m using was originally designed for a 6V device and in full sunlight only produces about 10V. Of course I never checked that before trying to use it on a 12V system.
Fortunately I just found a suitable replacement at a garage sale today for !! I tested it and it’s producing about 18V.
FYI – The charge controller is not very sophisitcated as this is a very small setup just to produce a little lighting in my shed (25W worth of LED lights). So there are no settings for battery type etc. However it has a lower voltage limit to kill the load connection as I mentioned and an upper limit to kill the solar panel connection when max charge is reached.
