Solar hot water, me too

Author	Message
Godoh Guru Joined: 26/09/2020 Location: Australia Posts: 421	Posted: 08:15pm 05 Mar 2023       Looks great, that will definitely fix the arching problem. After reading your post on your build, I was thinking of making something like it too. Then I realised that my Victron BMV had a relay in it that I have been using for my manual hot water control. So I set the voltage points on it, and used another relay to turn my shed inverter on and off between those points. Now my hot water system works automatically too. It is a solar hot water system with a Wet back in the wood heater for winter, now it uses excess solar power to the element too. I have an electronic thermostat on the tank that turns on a relay to power the element, now a second relay also starts the inverter. I tried to get my head working on arduino again, ( have not touched that stuff for years now) but it was fuzzy ( my head that is). So I reverted to relay logic. Pretty easy for my head to get around. Your controller looks great. I only run my panels at 70 to 90 volts DC so it would not work for my system. High voltage DC scares me a bit after working years ago on valve guitar amplifiers and blowing up a couple of multimeters on them. Cheers Pete