I have an AC300 with two B300 battery packs. I lost power yesterday at around noon. At 8 PM the batteries were fully charged. I used them during the night and in the morning they were shown at 67 percent. The system runs my astronomical observatory. Ony the AC output is turned on. During the night the system ran nicely at aroubd 200watts all night long.
Today the batteries will not charge from my 4 Renogy 160 watt solar panels connected in parallel giving around 12 volts. The app doesn’t show me the input voltage, so that’s just an estimate. The PV input shows between 0 and 150 watts all day long but the battery percentages just keep going down. The output shows as 0 watts as almost everything except my router and an small ethernet switch is turned off.
Is there any way to wake them up from my house 90 miles away?
If I drive out there what tests do you recommend that I do?
Is there a trouble shooting guide available?
Will the batteries simply shut down safely when they reach 10 percent without any damage?
Once turned off, the device cannot be woken up remotely via the app, but it can be activated when solar charging.
From the current information provided, the output power has consistently been greater than the input power, causing the AC300+B300 to deplete until it shuts down.
The discharge depth of the AC300 is 95%, leaving 5% battery capacity to prevent over-discharge. Therefore, recharging soon after shutdown will not harm the battery.
We need to determine whether the solar panel you are using has always had an input power of only 0-150W since you purchased it or if this issue arose after some time of use.
It appears that the solar charging power data is indeed problematic, and we generally do not recommend connecting solar panels in parallel. Please provide the specific parameters of your solar panels so that we can suggest the optimal connection scheme.
The panels are 4 160watt Renogy panels that delivered a consistent 400 or so watts to the old battery pack from Goal Zero. The maximum I’m getting from your AC300 is 150 watts.
The problem seems to be that your AC300 wants higher voltage that then 18.7 that’s being supplied by the panels which are connected in parallel.
Do you know of any device that I can buy to boost the voltage? Otherwise I think that my only option is to rewire the panels in series.
I’d also like to understand why you advertise that the system works with 12 volts when it obviously does not.
If your panels have an output around 12 volts at maximum power, then their voltage output will be below 12 volts under many circumstances. For the AC300 the 12 volt is the low limit, so if it falls below that the PV input will become 0 watts.
I am going to make some assumptions based on the panels you’ve described. I will assume the Vmp is around 12 volts (maybe 20 volts?), and that the Voc is somewhere around 23 to 26 volts. Since you have 4 panels the best configuration is to put them in series. If the Voc is 25 volts the array Voc would be come 100 volts (25 volts x 4 panels), and this is well within the 150 volt limit of the AC300 MPPT controllers, and will allow power harvesting with less-than-optimal sunshine.
If you can provide the information for your panels these assumptions can be confirmed.
The AC300 tells me that the voltage is 18.1 from the Renogy PV panels. It does NOT fall below 12 volts.
I think that the problem is that the PV input on the AC300 is limited to 9.7 amps. I ignored that specification when I bought the system.
So the VOC would become 72 volts is reconnected in serial. It may be a bit more as the 20 foot cables between the panels and the array would now be running at much higher voltage.
I believe that the open circuit value for these panels is 12 volts and they are 5 years old. I can’t figure out how we are getting 18 volts unless I connected them in some odd way at the time.
Connect your panels in series (up to max. 145V VOC per input) and everything is fine. The current is automatically limited to max. 12A per input of the AC300.
For longer distance wiring, a higher voltage and corresponding lower current is actually better with regards to power loss. Your current would be up to 8.3A instead of 12A if you are maxing out the AC300’s PV input current limit.
Renogy 160W glass panels are 22.9V open circuit, they are not 12V panels, so your 18.1V sounds correct.
It really would have been nice for the specifications to be a bit clearer.
It’s a rather nasty job to reconnect our panels. It’'s 100 degrees out where the panels are deployed that we have to get behind them and reconnect everything.
I love your product and just pulled the trigger on another set. It also would have been nice if your support staff were better trained.
Even now assuming that I can reconnect (did I buy the right wiring?) I’m still guessing about how much power the systems can really accept.
The PV input specifications that the AC300 requires are listed on the specs tab on the website that sells the AC300, which is 12 to 150V, 12A.
If you can reconnect the Renogy 160W panels, I would do the following:
Reconnect all 4 Renogy 160W panels in series to give you a 91.6V open circuit system, which delivers about 8A under optimum conditions.
Due to the much higher PV voltage, it is more likely to stay in the optimum range even under partial or weaker sunlight. At the peak, it should give you 640W, but can possibly go a bit higher when you have very bright sunlight on a cold clear day. Do keep in mind that it is now a higher voltage system, so you should always check the input voltage if you do choose to disconnect the AC300 and connect some other solar generator in the future.
I’m sorry that you blame the fact that there is incomplete information on the product, but the reality is that like any electronic device the documentation contains the important basic information of the product, which works perfectly according to specification and is very easy to use, while how to best use the product in more specific situations always depends on the knowledge in the field or in asking for information in a forum where multiple users share their experiences and opinions.
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Like many other users kindly explained to you, your PV system is not configured to get the best power from it from an AC300 and your panels should be rewired in series.
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Increasing the voltage to lower the current and to have a better efficiency in distributing power is a general rule of electric energy and especially valid in PV systems.
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Also the basic knowledge about voltage conversion tells that: if your AC300 solar charge controllers accept a 12-150 voltage range and the battery nominal voltage is 51.2 volt that means the solar charge controller is a buck/boost type and you should input more than the nominal voltage if you would like to have better efficiency.
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When you have a solar charge controller with an input of 12-150 volts and 12 amps it doesn’t mean that it will draw 12 amps across the entire voltage range: voltage and amps are always represented by an efficiency curve where you will probably get the maximum power with higher voltages in buck mode (input higher than output) than in boost mode (input lower than output).
If the output is powered by a battery, as on the AC300, and the battery’s nominal voltage is 51.2 volts, you should probably input more than 51.2 volts into the solar charge controller to prevent it from operating in boost mode, by increasing the voltage, as this will result in a more significant loss of efficiency.
Well, when I called support, I got vague answers about what to do about the issue I was having. What I needed was to have someone simply TELL me that I needed to wire in serial. When I called in the system GUI was in Chinese characters and the support person couldn’t even tell me how to fix it. After I figured that out on my own he then “suggested” that the system would work better if the panels were serially connected. FWIW, the voltage was around 19 volts on PV1 and PV2, nowhere near 12 volts. Anyway, we did a quick change on now we are peaking at just under 400 watts and 38 volts on PV1. We’ll probably do a second round of rewiring when the weather gets under 100 degrees.
I have a new question. We have connected out telescope systems to the AC outlet. That means that the inverters are running in both AC300’s. How much current loss should we be getting at low discharge - under 200watts/hour - rates? It looks like we are losing 60 watts an hour from running them. Does this make sense?
Hi @ross , Based on your description, when both AC300 units have AC output enabled, there will be a certain amount of self-consumption. Losing 60W per hour is within the normal range.
