Ref/Sol -- High Speed Love

I've made some discoveries as far as the fridge and solar go. First one is that with the really cloudy day we had day before yesterday even with more panels that I need for sunny days there wasn't enough for cloudy days. I didn't run out of power even running the fridge, the laptop until late and using the 22 inch monitor to watch movies on, but if there had been several real cloudy days then I'd have been in trouble. Especially since the gas powered battery charger is broken down.

To off set that problem I've added 4 more panels to the two old batteries and am running the fridge off of them and the added panels during the day to give the main bank more time and watts to get fully charged. I was having to wait until at least 10:00 AM before switching the fridge from the main bank running off of the inverter at 110 volts. (Actually less because I only get about 99 to 109 volts from the inverter.)  That means that the transformer the fridge runs off of is putting out less voltage to run it. (Something like 10.5 to 11 Volts.) That causes the fridge not to do as good as it should even though its been doing fairly well with the cooler weather.

Now that I've added the extra solar panels to the old battery bank I can switch the fridge to it around 8:30 or 9:00. I also run the fridge off of direct battery power when I switch so it gets more than the full 12 volts its supposed to which increases the efficiency a good bit and it works better in the heat of the day. At night the lower voltage doesn't effect it much because it has a much lower heat load on it.

And for the heck of it... High Speed Love

You'll have to watch it all to see what I mean.