6 Siemens SP75 (75-watt) modules

Occasionally it is a customer's requirement to involve themselves as little as possible in the ongoing care & maintenance of their power system. This customer was willing to pay a little more for "turn key" components to achieve his goal of minimum intervention. The camp, an old hunting lodge, is located among a stand of evergreens, on the edge of a large pond outside Moores, NY.  Since the lodge had no space for batteries & controls, a small control shed to house the power components was built onto an outside wall.  It's not uncommon for this area of the North Country to experience temperatures of -30 degrees F. in the dead of winter. A reliable, maintenance-free battery had to be found to stand up to the cold.  In addition, several loads are left on unattended for long periods of time. With no wintertime guarantee of solar charging (clouds & snow will greatly inhibit power generation), the potential exists for the batteries to discharge and freeze without a reliable means of backup charging. Control & overcurrent protection components were pre-wired and mounted on plywood, then attached to the inside wall of the power shed. Controls include:  Trace DR2424 inverter  Trace C40 array charge controller  Trace 175 amp main disconnect  Photron Batterylite state-of-charge indicator and Genwizard auto-start circuit  Vermont Solar Chargeboost transformer

The battery bank consists of 10 GNB Sunlyte batteries. The Sunlyte is a sealed 12v, 100 AHR battery employing absorbed glass mat (AGM) technology. These batteries are freeze tolerant and rated for 1200 charge/discharge cycles at an 80% depth of discharge. They far exceed the performance of standard sealed gel cell batteries, and are only slightly more expensive. A Bogart Tri-metric meter is mounted upstairs in the kitchen for convenient monitoring of battery voltage, current, and state-of-charge.

A 5kw Honda generator rounds out the system. The generator starter is interfaced with a Photron Batterylite state-of-charge indicator and a Genwizard remote start module. The Batterylite estimates state-of-charge in 10% increments. It sends a signal to the Genwizard to automatically start the generator when the battery bank falls to a user-programmable state of charge. AC power from the generator operates the Trace battery charger until the state-of-charge rises to a preset percent, when the Batterylite removes its signal from the Genwizard, stopping the generator. The start/stop levels are programmed to 60/90% respectively for this system. 

Even a high quality generator such as the Honda can have trouble powering the battery charger to the maximum rated output. The Chargeboost transformer installed here resulted in significant current gains. Without the transformer, a maximum observed current of the Trace DR2424's charger was only 45 out of a possible 70 amps. The addition of the Chargeboost increased maximum observed current to 67 amps @ 28.0 vdc, nearly 100% of the charger's maximum rating.
 

10 GNB Sunlyte AGM sealed batteries

Honda 5 kw generator