Quote:
Originally Posted by VineVixen
Our FLX only reached 80% only operating the refrigerator. At night we would lose about 9%. We were 3 days fry camping with full Sun. The third day we only reached 70%, then ran the AC for 1 hour and charge dropped to 40%
Dropped 13% overnight. We are home refrigerator is off, microwave and TV are unplugged, full Sun all day at 5 pm only 54% charged.
We are still under warranty. Shouldn’t the charge recover more quickly?
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Put a good quality VOM set to 24VDC across the solar panel leads directly to the charge controller when the panels are under as full sun as possible. Most of all check the integrity of the circuits for any shorts with the VOM set to OHMs to see if there is anything drawing that shouldn't be.
Then look up the actual voltage ratings of installed panels. If you do not get good service from the dealer who sold you the unit then document the discrepancies from factory specs.
Good wiring practices usually wind up with decent results but if there are defects in the gear or the way it was wired you should document it. Could also be a fridge that has faulty seals and leaks too much cold air for that matter so there are a great many reasons why the power draw might be excessive. Or the power output of the panels to the charge controller might be inadequate or the the charge controller itself might have defects that cause problems.
I hope that your problems are not bad wiring because that can be a nightmare to trace. We had a bad ground wire pinched to our clearance lights and brake lights and that was a royal PITA to fix because it shorted somewhere on the frame that we could not find so we had to replace it.
We do not have a unit with dealer or factory installed solar options. We just use 100 watts of panels directly to our agm batteries but it is a royal pain to setup and lug around so we are selling the solar panels and controller. Still it takes more than a full day of bright sun to recharge from 40% with 160 amp hours of batteries. Mind you we do run our fridge on propane off grid because it is the greatest draw hands down other than running a furnace fan all night. We still manage 4 days even in the cold with only 160 amp hours of agm. The stock dometic 4 cubic foot fridge was using over 60% of 120 amp hours of from the dealer installed cheap deep cycle FLA batteries in about 5 hours when we bought the trailer, so we rarely use the fridge on battery power. Only if absolutely necessary. We have gone to slightly better AGM batteries as the originals started to get to weak. Decent quality agms take a little more discharge without causing problems voltage wise and if not abuse should last longer that sealed FLA.
I suspect that your fridge is using quite a bit of juice. It is always a good idea to use shore power to bring the fridge to cold or propane. A fridge will take large amounts of power to get down to the 38-39f or 3-4 celcius where it should be run for food safety.
A really great trick is to use freezer packs to cool the fridge and it's compartment freezer way down before putting food in it. We use cooler bags with ice packs to transport our food to the campsite not the fridge and never run the fridge going down the road. Our fridge will fault out if it is parked for more than a few minutes on even the 6% slope like the one in our drive way. So going down or up a long mountain highway might indeed cause the fridge to fault code and shut off or even ruin the unit. I have only fault coded our fridge once by using parked on a slope. Thank heavens it did not hurt it the way older fridges without modern compressor protection circuitry can be damaged. We avoided the expense that others have fallen into who run the fridge all the time going down the road and parked on slight slopes.
Personally I would not use the DC system for the RV fridge unless we had at least 400 amp hours of battery capacity. I am setting up to have 400 amp hours next year so that we can off road for longer periods but with our trailer it will require having the extra batteries in the back of our pickup truck to increase our off grid capacity without resorting to PITA noisey gen sets or enough solar panels to run an internet data center!
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