?-how to; solar battery maintainer; 24v rig-12v rig? (Both dual batteries)

[LCDiesel60]

I hope this is the right section to ask for help..

Many years ago I bought a small solar panel kit (panel/charge controller) for the dual battery 24v HJ60 Land Cruiser and a 12v system for the power stroke f350 dual battery to keep the batteries charged when sitting long term.
Don’t recall where I bought them to ask for battery hookup instructions so called a couple solar companies and got differing answers on where do I connect the pod/neg wires from charge controller?

HJ60 is series connection on 2-12v batts and f350 diesel is 2-12v in parallel.

On 24v I’m guessing ‘low side battery’ (farthest away) for one or both wires?

On 12v black wire on distant batt ground and red on near/main batt positive?

Can someone please tell me where to battery connect my wires for each system please?

I’m glad to learn and think things through..but haven’t clearly understood on 24v where to run those 2-charge wires since poss/neg are combined…

Thankyou!

 

[peesalot]

So you have a 24v solar system & a 12v solar system for separate vehicles. The 12v is as described.
24v - Verify the output is 24v, your series linked batts will have a pos & neg connected to obtain the 24v, use the other pos & neg terminals the vehicle uses, not the connected/linked terminals.

 

[e9999]

^that's right, on the 24V system you just need to find the battery terminals that are about 24V apart and connect the controller to those, being careful about the polarity (meaning the + on the controller goes to the higher voltage plus of one of the batteries and the - to the neg terminal of the other battery). But it is essential that you set your controller to a 24V mode, not the 12V mode if it has both. And adjust the various parameters if it lets you. If you have a DC voltmeter you can easily measure the voltage of each of the terminals wrt to ground and find out which battery has the higher voltage (upstream so to speak).
I would connect the controller / charger directly to the battery terminals, not far away, but that's not critical if there is no load "in between".
On the 12V system it should not matter which battery you connect the charger to, or which of the pos or neg terminals for that matter, as long as you respect the polarity.

 

[george_tlc]

On the 24V 60 series, one battery's -VE will go to the engine block (we can call that GND) and that same battery's positive will travel to the -VE terminal of the second battery and its +VE terminal will be nominally 24V above ground (engine block) potential (we can call that +24V).

So, connect the -VE of your 24V solar charger to the GND terminal in the text above and connect the +VE of your 24V solar charger to the +24V terminal in the text above.

A multimeter would be good to double check this.

The 12V vehicle is easy as per the answers above.

cheers,
george.