Hi Cruisers,
I just looked closely at the
wiring diagram for the Morningstar TS-45 controller which I am about to
purchase to manage my Aerogen
wind generator, and I realised that it is not quite the "black-box" solution I had expected.
In the manual, the
wiring diagram for the
wind generator with diversion configuration (picture attached) connects the
wind generator straight to the
batteries. The
regulator then appears to switch on the diversion load (resistor style
heater elements in my case) as required to shed excess
power. I suppose I had expected the
wind generator to be connected to the
regulator and the regulator would "divert" excess
power from the wind generator as required to the resistors, depending on the calculated state of the
battery bank.
Meanwhile I have a Votronic
MPPT 420 controller managing the power from the
solar panels, which I am going to assume will account for most of my power generation.
While I felt comfortable with the
concept of the two controllers talking directly to the
battery bank, and being smart enough to handle the variation in input power (let's face it, there are plenty of multi-regulator
charging systems out there today) I am a lot less comfortable with the idea of the wind generator being connected directly to the battery bank and relying on the Morningstar to dump power as needed. Not least because I can see how the power dump might get activated by the Votronic putting
solar power into the system if the two regulators are not in total agreement about the state of charge, float vs bulk vs absorbtion etc. OK, excess power is excess power but I don't want the dump resistors pumping out heat unnecessarily and messing with the brains of the Votronic which has been doing a great job to date.
Any ideas? I'm a bit stumped by this one.