Rod, It's good news that you solved the problem with your solar-powered repeater.
I wonder if the company that is running a solar-power system without a charge controller is just lucky that nothing has been damaged due to overvoltage or battery overcharging. Of course, how would they know? Changing out two very large (1,500 Ampere-Hours each) batteries once a year could be masking a serious problem. With an appropriate charge controller handling the flow of electrons, those batteries should last ten years! That company must be long on money but short on solar system design experience. That's just my personal opinion, of course! Looking at the positive side, that company's policy resulted in the donation of a couple of year-old batteries to help out a Ham, and that's a good thing. 73, Eric Lemmon WB6FLY -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2007 3:20 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Repeater-Builder] GR300 on Solar update We found a diode that was installed backwards, on the positive line from the wind generator/solar panels. We turned it around and we have not had a problem since that time; that was about 10 weeks ago. We removed the wind gen and its wiring. Why? The company that donated the batteries has a repeater that is powered by two 35 watt panels, no charge controller, two 1500 amp batteries and the tx is at 100watts. They have no problem with this set-up for over 7 years. They swap out the batteries every year. Now my repeater has one 110 watt and one 115 watt panel, with a charge controller, two 1500 amp batteries and 21 watts output. Works like a champ. Thank you all for your input. Rod KC7VQR
