How we each need to treat batteries is almost as personal as choosing a wife! There are lots of small points that we need to work out and one of them is solar which I have little to no experience with using in real time!
My solar experience is limited to looking at drawings and talking to the folks who are doing the work! Pretty close to guessing!
But if we look at solar power being the same as any other power source, we might make some changes in the routine to cover the differences?
One way to mod our efforts to help on the problem of full time charging is to put eh charge on a timer. That can reduce the effects of full time charging and help there but it also leaves the question of watching the water!
I have a small lawn mower battery stored in a shed. being a sealed battery, I don't worry the fluid issue but I also don't want the battery setting there on charge full time.
So I set up a timer system that lets me ignore it for the few months when we don't mow. I let it run down a bit, then the timer turns the charge on to bring it back before it gets too low. We do go in/out of the shed often enough to know the power is still good.
When charging with solar, do you have a convenient way to power a small timer on 110AC, as well as the solar output?
A small timer, using 110AC to turn the charge to the batteries on/off occasionally would let you reduce the labor involved and get the normal "cycle" done for the batteries. But then it might take some watching to see how the battery water level is doing. Watching the water is a biggie as running the plates up above water level is really bad for life span!
There are automatic battery water systems but they are not good if the weather is cold enough to freeze the supply! No personal experience with them.
When I was last in really actual cold, I was not in charge of any batteries but when the temps dipped and got down low enough to worry, I often saw batteries moved inside. But that was a long time back and way, way colder than 10 degrees! In town, the meters had power supply provided to keep the engines heaters and batteries good while shopping and such.
When driving out on the lake to fish, the guys often moved the battery inside with us.
One thing we were sure of was that we did not want a dead battery when we wanted to leave! I'm glad I was a rookie and never needed to make those decisions!
I just went with the guys who knew and did what they did!
