Regulator combination for Aquagen and solar panels??

[Toutvabien]

I am currently refitting the boat for a bit of a long distance jolly later this year and current problem is how to integrate battery charging from Aqua4gen water turbine and a couple of 50 Watt solar panels. It appears that to keep a load on the Aquagen I need a regulator with a heat dump to dissapate excess ampage once batteries are fully charged. Any pointers as to how best to achieve this and components that would enable such a set up to be installed reasonably easily.

 

[npf1]

I've recently been looking into the same "issue" and have come to the conclusion that it's probably a "non issue". Why? When the water gen is working, we're likely to be using as many amps as it produces (fridge, PC, instruments, maybe radar, nav lights), so the batteries are unlikely to be ever overcharged.

Not sure the same will apply for you, but if you do want to head down this complex route, the Xantrex C Series regulators can do all you need and divert to a resistive dump load when the batteries are charged. You'll need to use a regulator, blocking diodes, breakers and have a suitably large dump load (water heating element). I was reading the manual for this only last night to confirm my thoughts and concluded that it was a very complex solution to a problem that is likley to never exist. So I'm planning to get a regular solar regulator for the panels and then feed the water gen directly to the batteries per its manual.

Hope that makes some sort of sense.

 

[Conachair]

Can´t be too much help other than desribing my own setup. I have an aerogen 4 wind generator and a single 50w solar panel (aerogen came with the boat). the aerogen has a regulator which kicks in at i think 14.5v, into a heat dump. You can hear it kicking in and out during gusts if batterries charged. Solar has never got voltage that high though it deliveres much more power in the real world than the wind gen. One irratating side effect is that the regultor kicks in while mains battery charger on, a lot of the time I switch the charger to gel to keep the voltage lower rather then unscrew one of the regulator terminals. Think the regulator came with the aero4gen. For liveaboard I find a battery meter invaluable, I´ve got a BEP something or other, does voltage on 2 banks and amps in/out with amps left in bank. Certainly gets me turning off lights to watch those amps ou go down. Good luck with your jolly
Padz - Conachair

 

[jerryat]

[ QUOTE ]
I've recently been looking into the same "issue" and have come to the conclusion that it's probably a "non issue". Why? When the water gen is working, we're likely to be using as many amps as it produces (fridge, PC, instruments, maybe radar, nav lights), so the batteries are unlikely to be ever overcharged. [ QUOTE ]


Exactly right. We used a Aqua4gen on our transats and wired it through fuses directly to the 420amp service battery bank. The daily load from 'fridge, instruments et al, prevented over-charging, though on occasion when the solar panels were also belting amps in and we were belting along, we did turn on a few internal/nav lights to absorb the excess.

BUT, we do have a Pulstronic digital ammeter that, like many similar units, measures amps in/out, total amps used etc, so monitoring was simple.

Basically you pretty soon get to know how much current is being generated for a given boatspeed, sunshine etc. We also have a Rutland 913 which happily bunged about 24-30 amps/day on average while on passage, but this was wired into the same regulator as the solar panels.