Renewable Energy Questions/Discussion > Automation, Controls, Inverters, MPPT, etc

heavy duty diodes

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Wolvenar:
I find many of my ideas end when the wife catches wind of them..  :-\

WooferHound:
You should hook the banks straight together like we all do, and get a bigger charge controller.

tomw:
Larry;

You seem to be imposing unrealistic limits on this system.

As long as the banks are the same voltage of the same type battery a rectifier (diode) is just going to be a point of failure & consumer of energy. A hunk of suitably sized copper cable will last for millenia, is cheap and is all you probably need. But I don't know your whole plan or reasoning for this unusual approach.

Actually, I would not use cable but cable, a fuse / breaker and possibly a switch between them.

In fact, my 450 AH pallet jack battery is connected with my 850 AH fork lift battery with a switch a breaker and of course some cable. All charged by the same sources of solar and wind. Controlled with a single 24 volt Ghurd Controller adapted to drive a large IGBT dumping power into a Kilowatt of dump load.

Glen is a long time member and sells kits and completed controllers when he is not on vacation in the South of France! :D :D

http://ghurd.info

Maybe explain further what you think you need and I am sure someone here can point you the right direction.

Tom

Rover:
Hi Larry,

As others have said, just create one big 24V bank (your 2 banks in parallel). The only reason I can think of trying to do what you suggest is if the battery banks are very different in charge/discharge capability, possibly due to age differential, and you have fears of undercharging or overcharging because of the variance in SOC when one bank is at full charge.

Even in that case I would still just connect them in parallel, or operate them entirely as 2 separate banks (possibly with a multibank battery switch so you can charge/discharge from one or all)

Rover

ghurd:
Like they said, just get the 2 banks connected together.
It will be more efficient to charge, and more efficient during discharge (that gets complicated to explain).

Think about this...
Say it is windy.  The wind bank is full, and the controller is dumping the surplus power on one battery bank.
But the reason it is windy is a 3 day thunderstorm, so it is not sunny.  The solar charged battery is in need of power.
That means one battery is dumping power the other battery could use!

Can still use the solar controller for the solar power.
Wind needs a dump load controller.

Or-
Beef up the dump load controller to handle the solar too, and don't need a solar controller, because a dump load controller does not care where the surplus power came from, it just cares there is too much of it.
Make sense?
G-

PS- The South of France?
OK, we'll go with that.
To me it feels like 200 miles South of the South Pole, but I ain't in France quite yet.

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