Well, that darned Chris Olson had to go on about how nice these were so I got bitten by the "gotta have" illness and got one from Northern Arizona Wind and Sun. Very fast shipment and nice folks to deal with. I called in my order rather than do it online.
I got it hooked up today after discovering yesterday my intended cable for it was apparently damaged on install. Limited continuity and only 0ne pair actually feeds the full distance so the meter was horribly off running over one pair of #24 in the Cat5. I guess I pulled too hard and managed to bork a bunch of the wires. The curse of doing things alone struck there. It really helps if someone feeds as another pulls the cable through 100 feet of conduit! I happened to have some #14 solid copper in for another use and retasked that for this until I bury more conduit or something because my current conduit is stuffed to overflowing. I thought I put in more cables than I would ever use but obviously I did not.
Live and learn.
It has not been hooked up long enough to sense a "full charge" but here is a picture of it and my turbine monitoring gages in the hallway in the house. Shows a kilowatt + coming in to the bank. That silly oval hole was where I mounted the Outback Mate but it was not the answer to getting Amy up to speed on how to decide when to add loads so I put it in the power room (my office / boars nest). No pictures of that, its embarrassingly "cluttered" in there.
This is the digital version of a "pegged meter" full over to the stop.
It correctly indicates battery voltage good enough for me. I cannot say exactly as this system is NEVER static it always has either a load or charge going in / out of it and voltage changes between reading the voltmeter and slipping across the drive to see the LED status. I am alone here this weekend so no help on that.
Especially if both the freezer and fridge fire up or the well decides to pump water. At 850 AH the bank is fairly stiff but it still floats around on the voltage in use.
At first I thought it was bad as it took awhile to decide what voltage it was connected too and some self test I assume before it settled down and worked.
So far very happy with it and I think it will help get everyone into the process of deciding to use the battery power. Now that it is "proved up" I will neaten up the cabling. [yeah, sure]
Just wanted to share.
Tom
