Good day my friends. I hope your vibration is high and intentions are good today. I'm following up to my post about upgrading my off grid electrical system. If you missed it you can find it here.
When I finally made out to my shed to start prepping new wires for my additional batteries in my existing 12 volt set up a moment of pause came over me. Was I doing this right and in a way that would benefit me the most over the long term or was I doing what was just financially easiest and less of a hit to my ego. Originally with the advice of some mentors and being new to all of this I set up a 12 volt system. It has served me well when I have used it but I have encountered some issues with it.
Charging in the winter is primarily done without the sun in my region as it is quite limited with cloudier and shorter days and while there are alternatives to petroleum based fuels running my generator to charge my batteries during these times I am not there yet. I want my reliance on things I can't produce to be minimalized and and having to charge my multiple batteries for many hours with my 12 volt charger gave me pause. That and the high cost and limited availability of 800 amp or greater rated busbars was also causing me to pause. This pause made me reevaluate whether or not I should be keeping my 12 volt system and my investments in it or upgrading to higher voltage system and utilizing more volume being able to be sent through my wires.
Initially after learning that combining 2 batteries in series would upgrade the voltage to 24 volt but keep the Ah rating at the same level as each individual battery(100 Ah) instead of doubling it to 200 Ah if I kept them at 12 volt and set them up in parallel I decided to keep my system and current configuration so I could retain the full 100 Ah of each of my batteries. However, my search for 800 plus amp busbars which is what I would need if all my batteries were hooked up in parallel was proving to be difficult and costly.
Wondering how people with much larger and more complex systems than mine caused me to dive deeper and figure out how they make it work. I have since learned that while sacrificing Ah in setting up my batteries in series and upgrading to 24 volt or 48 volt I would not be sacrificing watts. basically in short, watts are what is needed to run anything that uses electricity while volts refers to the volume of electricity being delivered and amps refers to the current of the volume of electricity being delivered. I guess I knew this before but it just hadn't registered in my brain yet.
With this new found recognition I determined with a 60 amp, 48 volt charger I could charge my batteries from 20% capacity to 100% in just around 3 hours if I am not drawing any energy while charging. In contrast my current setup with 12V would take around 12 hours to do the same thing. This revelation means I'll be spending less money in gas and have less hours being logged on my generators which is of long term importance to my strategy.
For this reason I started leaning towards a 24 or 48 volt system. Factoring in other things like being able to utilize the current busbars I have which are rated for 400 amps and the readily availability of 400 amp and 600 amp busbars for future expansion and less strain on my entire system in general helping to make it last longer and being able to use other larger power consuming equipment without the use of my generators I decided to ditch my 12 volt system and upgrade to a 48 volt system. A quick chat with one of my mentors who currently has a 24 volt system helped confirm this choice when he told me if he had the capital to upgrade to 48 volt at this point he would.
I will continue to keep you posted on my progress as I do this upgrade. I currently am in the process of returning some purchases and waiting for new ones to be shipped.