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Posts: 32926
Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin | Is anyone using an onboard solar charger for electric troling motor batteries? |
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Posts: 22
| A couple years ago I went with a freind to Canada using his Fish / Ski glass boat - I can say that he had rigged up 4 solar chargers to continuously trickle charge the battery and it worked great. Only bad was that you need to keep some Windex on board and keep them clean all the time or their conversion % drops greatly.
The trick is to find an area on your boat that is not in use for the solar collector to lay flat to the sun. |
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Posts: 95
Location: LOTW every chance I get | I have been considering the same thing Steve. We don't have electricity at our cabin on LOTW except for a generator, making it cumbersome to keep batteries charged. I was wondering if leaving the TM battery hooked up to a solar panel would work for recharging it between weekend uses. Anybody have any idea as to what kind of wattage would be needed on the panel?
Dave |
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Location: Athens, Ohio | Google "solar battery chargers" and you might find you answer. m |
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Posts: 2754
Location: Mauston, Wisconsin | To All- re. solar battery chargers. They are wonderful things if the sun is shining. However, they are not so great when it's cloudy unless the system has been oversized. Mike & I just got back from a Canadian 7 day flyin where the only lights were solar. They had converted the cabin from gas lighting to solar. We were in bed by ~ 8:00PM every night, and typically ate our dinner in candle light illumination level. No, we are both hetrosexual. I was very happy I had brought my "Cyclop's" LED fishing head lamp- It allowed me to cook, clean & read at night. To be honest, I think the battery on the solar system was either bad or the solar charge controller was bad. However, we also had a majority of very cloudy days so "Mother Nature" was probably at least partially at fault. Being an electrical engineer I'm working on a effective solution.
Have fun!
Al
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Posts: 1764
Location: Ogden, Ut | Based upon this thread I decided to hook up a solar maintainer to my TM battery a few days ago. Get a lot of sun here in the desert - most of the time anyway. Thought it would be a good way to top off or at least maintain full my battery. Granted my solar panel is small (5 watt, I believe), the charge it puts back into the battery is nearly insignificant. Over the course of a full day I added a whopping .08 volt to my deep cycle battery. I think it would take just over a week to charge it fully - and that depends heavily on how far it has been discharged and the intensity of the sunlight I suppose. So for maintenance, they're probably fine, at least my battery isn't just spontaneously discharging, but for adding significantly to the charge, I need a much bigger (and more expensive) solar panel.
Sorno |
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