Hi All,
Thank you all for the input.
An
electrical engineer finally put me straight on how this should be set up and this is what we will be doing shortly.
The wind generator is an Ampair 300 tuned to 24v and will be connected directly to our main Buzz Bars for input charging The load will draw the voltage back to what the batteries can handle until they achieve a high state of charge. This buzz bar set connects the solar, 240v and wind generator charging to our batteries. Our solar
panels will be reset in series to output 24v into a Blue Sky 3024i controller with a Duo upgrade fitted to it. This effectively adds a monitoring circuit to the solar controller to sense the state of charge of the batteries. When the batteries achieve a fully charged status a switch automatically engages a power dump from the batteries to something useful like a
water heater or a
watermaker or we can as we closely
monitor our state of charge turn on our 240v
inverter and bake some bread or something that will chew up the excess power being generated. Or we can simply shut down the wind generator until the batteries are in need of another boost. If we are not aboard for some time we will choose this option as part of our lock the
boat up process.
When the sun is shining with clear skies we usually are quite fine power wise it is only when the weather is overcast or rainy that we suffer from a lack of power right at the time when we would use our laptops or watch a
movie or the like... then we struggle with power. At present the gen-set goes on and the tranquility of the setting is destroyed. The Ampair 300 is quiet as in no
noise and will solve the problems unless there is no sun and no wind which in our part of the world is rare.
I'll post the results when the job is finished and I've had a chance to assess its success.
In the meantime the correct answer to the original question about running the two 12v battery banks in series for charging while simultaneously drawing 12v from each bank was a definite "don't do it" from the
engineer as this has all sorts of potential problems associated with it.
My next post will be a while as it will take a bit of time to make the genny riser pole and install everything between the important jobs like
fishing and sailing in our summer season.
Cheers all,
Fabian