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battery voltage when charged/flat + measuring current

What sort of voltages should i expect across the terminals on a battery when it is either fully charged or not?

Battery is a 110Ah leisure battery that was last charged a month or so ago. No load on it.

I finally got round to rigging up the solar panel on the 101 properly. It is charging the battery thru a cheap maplins regulator (which has 2 LED's on - charging and battery full).

Charging light is currently on and ive just watched a voltmeter on the battery move from 12.59 to 12.66 over 5 mins - so its presumably doing something. What should it be when it is 'full'?

Also - is there any way of measuring how much charge im getting off my panel? (without spending mucho money on a proper fancy charge controller!) I have tried putting my multimeter on amps and putting it in line between the regulator and battery but it reads 0 and makes the charging LED go out (so i assume it confuses the regulator).

Reply to
Tom Woods
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Haven't time to reply properly - but this may help:

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Chap on one of my 'slightly more regular' groups who really knows his stuph - bit like Stephen Hull (I hope I've remembered that right), the paint guru here.

Reply to
.mother

You didn't forget to put the multimeter leads in the appropriate sockets when you switched over to amps did you? :-) Easily done, I usually forget for a while until it dawns.

Martin

Reply to
Oily

Simply, no. You need to integrate the charging current WRT time. A bit of hacking with one of these:

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you can do it with a 1 wire to USB adapter. Steve

Steve

Reply to
Steve Taylor

Thanks Martyn, some interesting reading on there. I do like the system that smartbank uses of having a seperate display on an rj11 cable! Ive run cat5 all over the ambi :)

I ran about 10 extra 12v wires between my dash and batteries and they are now getting used incredibly quickly! (just today, 2 for feeds from both batteries, 4 for 2 seperate solar panels, then 2 for voltmeter displays)

Ive found this thing too:

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which seems quite neat (and doesnt cost too much!)

Reply to
Tom Woods

erm.. maybe i did forget to swap the lead over...

I'll try again tommorrow! Too dark now and the main battery (has the internl lights on at the mo) doesnt even have enough beans in it to turn on the mini flurescent in the back.

Reply to
Tom Woods

That looks good, but *I* have bugger all chance of assembling it into a working box! ;)

That bluesky box

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is ~£50 and claims to do it.

echo!

Reply to
Tom Woods

With the leads actually swapped it gives a reading! (0.7A on an overcast day which aint too shabby). Smoke comes out of the multimeter at the same time but it still works fine so it must be non-magic smoke!

Reply to
Tom Woods

OK, rated current output of the panel is 2.3A (I assume this is in proper sun not weak UK sun). Is 0.7 typical for over here?

If i was to buy another panel, can i run them in parallel through a single regulator/charge controller or not?

Reply to
Tom Woods

2.3A should be under UK full sun, normal to the panel AND probably not too hot at the panel itself, they'll do anything to make their numbers look good.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Taylor

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