How should I go about connecting five 40-watt solar panels to charge AC200MAX?
Hi @bluetti_bcalertpalgmailcom
Welcome back!
To better help you, it will be great when you can share the specs of your 40W Panels and the way you want to play them. Interesting values would be the VOC and current.
greetings
Erik
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Thank you for your reply.
I hope this will help. Power Rating: Maximum rating 40 Watts (under ideal conditions)
Current: 2.3 Amps @ 17.1V
For additional info, please go to: 40 Watt, 12-Volt Crystalline Solar Panel - Sunforce Products
Using five 40W rigid panels to charge the AC200MAX is not an ideal choice, but you can connect five in series using MC4 connectors to the AC200MAX. Compared to the PV input parameters of the AC200M, you will find that the charging efficiency of these panels will be very slow.
Don’t use the solar charge controller.
To put them in series, as Bluetti-Admin advises you, you will need SAE - MC4 adapter cables like these to connect your panels in serial directly to the bluetti solar input.
does bluetti sell sae-mc4 cables?
Bluetti doesn’t sell it, I’ve never seen it. However, you can find it on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/CERRXIAN-10AWG-Female-Adapter-Conector/dp/B07T5Y2HQZ/
I don’t know if you already bought some, but when shopping for solar panels you want the highest Voc without hitting the max value listed in your owner’s manual. You can go over wattage and over amps, but not over max Voc. It has to stay within the limits of the Bluetti, but of course you want the highest wattage output you can get.
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The listed wattage of a panel is always higher than what you’ll get in the real world, (I know, it sucks). You’ll usually want to overpanel, that is, provide more wattage than the PV input says which is fine. Just stay below the Voc limit. That extra wattage will be helpful on cloudy days.
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If you wire the panels in Series, the Voc adds up.
In parallel, the Voc stays constant, the same Voc of a single panel.
You can wire up panels in a combination of series-parallel to try to come up with the highest Voc within limits.
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As far as those Coleman panels go, it doesn’t specify Voc; it just says working volts of 17.1. I think those are more for car battery charging, and are overpriced. You have a max Voc of 145v input, so no problem wiring them in series as 5 x 17.1= 85.5 volts. And 85.5 x 2.3A = 196 watts, so it’s not ideal for charging but it will work. Ideally you can have 900W solar charging.
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Five Renogy 100W panels from Amazon in series would give you around 470 Watts, and at 121.5 Voc you’d be within your Voc limit. Two series strings of 5 panels, wired in parallel, would put you at about 940 Watts of solar charging power. I have an array of 18 of these 100 W panels in my back yard, for almost 1500W for one input of my AC500. (You read that right, 18 panels to get 1500W, because of panel inefficiencies. But at the time they were two for $79 so it was a good deal. Now they are $86 each.)
Amazon. If you don’t have a crimper you can buy premade cables with mc4 on each end, but it’s more expensive than buying a spool of paired wires, mc4s, and a crimper.