Anyone recently purchased a power station with embedded charge controller, battery and inverter. Have you noticed that at twilight the solar input charge controller relay cherps. This is beacuse the solar panel cannot produce enough energy to continously energise the relay; which subsequently disconnects the solar input. As there is no load the Voc of the panel increased and the whole cycle repeats. Because this is really annoying I have decided to make a new project. The idea is a circuit with Arduino that measures the solar panels current. If the power to the power station drops below 5W it will disconnect the solar input, and switch in a resistive load. The arduino will continally monitor the current until a preset of 5W is reached, switch out the resistive load and switch in the power station. I think i will also add a small display.
What configuration of hardware would you suggest for this project? Is there a better solution?
Thanks for your feedback.
Solar panel input: 420W, 36V Voc, 11.6A.
Power Station: Aferiy P210
Sounds like a reasonable idea, but I wonder how the power monitor will be powered.
To measure panel current and voltage, the INA260 is a good choice. However, it may not be safe for a 36V panel, as that is the top of the sensor range and leaves no headroom for open circuit voltage measurements.
Already discussed with Aferiy. There is no solution at present, appently a common issue across different manufacturers. They suggested manually turning off the solar input during twilight or put up with the clicking. That not happening lol.
