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[HDaugus]

Originally Posted by ATrain

When you say that you see it's full by the meter...does this mean you have to switch off the charging or something?

I was imagining you hook it up, it charges until a certain voltage, then stops charging? Never worked with solar before though.

Honestly I’m not exactly sure how the floating voltage works but once it gets to fully charged the meter keeps cycling fairly quickly from about 52-53v to around 63 (don’t quote me on those exact numbers but something like that). I think through that process it is trickle charging to keep the batteries topped. You don’t have to turn anything off when it’s fully charged. The system just keeps topping the battery as it needs it. At least this is how I understand it to work but I’m no expert. I think how the solar charge controller is set up determines how much juice flows through to the battery at each of the charging stages.

[HDaugus]

I've attached additional pictures:

Cover: The summer sun on our driveway murders vinyl seats and since I can't put a cover over the panels I had to make my own one that hangs with grommets and hooks off the roof rail. It could be more beautiful but it does the trick.

Support rails for the solar panels: If you do this you will want to unbolt the roof on both the front and back ends of one side, lift the roof up and slide the new square rails in. It's easier to do one side at a time than to take it all off. Be careful because the cut ends of the rails can scratch the plastic roof. Because the roof slopes down from the front, you'll need some washers or something to fill in the gap and make it stable. We used A LOT of stacked washers. You will want to guess better than we did at the length of the bolt needed. Ours is too long. We should probably cut it but so far no one has hit their head on it. It's pretty high up there.

Voltage meter: as described above this is how we did it. I mounted the voltage meter in a little plastic box that I painted black.

[HDaugus]

Originally Posted by ATrain

When you say that you see it's full by the meter...does this mean you have to switch off the charging or something?

I was imagining you hook it up, it charges until a certain voltage, then stops charging? Never worked with solar before though.

I just looked at the voltage meter more closely while it's at floating voltage and it floats between 54.6 and 58.0.