Miswired????
 

Hello, Just joined today to get some advice from like minded folks. I have been living off grid for 5 years now and have a small 12 volt 30 amp solar powered system. I have 6 panels hooked up to 4 golf cart batteries and use a Xantrex inverter and a Tri Star charge controller. All has been perfect up until the charge controller went haywire and I almost over heated my batteries. I since received a new controller from Tri Star and the alarm keeps saying miswire. I have all my negatives and positives hooked up properly and batteries are holding a charge. I am using a small 8 amp charge controller to keep batteries from going down. I have tested everything with my volt meter and everything is fine. I returned the new charge controller back to Tristar one more time and they have sent 1 more brand new charger and I just hooked it up and the same alarm saying miswire is still beeping. Any ideas on what is happening? I even brought in an electrical engineer who used to hook up solor systems in Europe and he even said everything on my system is hooked up right. He cant find what would cause the miswire alarm to go off. Has anyone ever encountered this?

Welcome to the site offgridinnc! Its good to have you here.

Can you get us pictures of the wiring, or draw up a schematic or something? Its hard to tell by just reading text what is going on.

If your batteries are 5 yrs. old, they may be bad. The voltage may look good but the charge/discharge cycles will get shallow. (Meaning the batteries will charge faster than normal and discharge faster) In this condition, during a charge cycle, your bulk voltage could be going too high for the inverter to accept. Just a guess..

Connect the battery to the controller before connecting the panels.

Or - just one battery could be bad . . . I like the idea of hooking up each battery by itself to check.


Steve

Check the batteries condition if suspect a quick hydrometer test will show you plenty

Golf Cart Battery Hydrometers - YouTube

That battery bank at typical golf cart amp hour rating is 440 ah. An 8 amp charge controller maxed out will barely maintain those batteries much less charge them after any usage. A shorted cell might well show up as miss wired. Ecomodded's suggestion to test with a hydrometer should let you know in a hurry. I would take two of the known good batteries and try hooking up to those.

The hydrometer is about $10 at the auto store. That's the first thing I'd check too.

It seems to me that you could hook the panels directly into the batteries if you have an open circuit voltage that's less than 30 volts. Good batteries will clamp the voltage down to 12.5 to 14 volts. Remove the connection occasionally, let the batteries settle down for a few minutes and check volts. Maybe you could save your batteries with a bulk charge if the controller is at fault.

Check the batteries case temperature to find out if one is warmer than the rest. The warm one is the one that could be bad. Take it out of the circuit and see if the other ones will charge properly.

If the batteries are 5 years old, they may have bit the dust and need replacing.