Before I comment on today, let me say yesterday the solar panels received about 4 hours of sun. The SLA battery lost a few hundreds of a volt. The load was the case fan, the inverter, and the charging of 8 batteries, plus a start on the charging of one DiNotte Li-ion battery.  I checked the battery with the AC charger when I brought the Power Box in—no charging needed.

Today was a real contrast. The sky was overcast.

I had the unit out for about 4 hours again. I ran my Garmin Nuvi 760—no problems with it running. The inverter could have been off, but I left it on. I did turn off the case fan

I lost about .15 volts. I’m down to about 12.5 volts of power—well above the controller shut-down voltage of 11.1 volts [see technical information to the left].

I checked the battery with the AC charger. Today, it would take a charge. I did not charge it, however. I want to see if the sun alone can bring the battery back to a level where the AC charger sees the battery as fully charged.

The experimentation is kind of cool and will help me better manage power on a tour.

The next few days we are to have rain. So, it is doubtful I’ll be able to continue testing for several days.

Rather than more drain on the battery, I want full sun. I’m interpreting that to mean, I have to check the forecast on tour for amount of sunshine to better manage my "charging/non-charging" activities the night before.

This is all very interesting stuff as Roger Zoul of BROL noted.

My BROL Quad [Fargo] Setup Thread