I saw that before mentioning the MEGA otherwise there’s no way I would have gone for it. That’s a crazy difference.
Oh, trust me when I say that I’ve read and noted some of your recommendations (en skoolgeld) over the years
Just something else I thought about:
Should the cable between the batteries also be 25mm^2 then or should that be larger?
So here’s how much fun I will have with lugs:
M8 to M8 to connect batteries
Negative:
M8 to M10 from battery to shunt
M10 to M5 from shunt to inverter
Positive:
M8 to M8 from battery to fuse
M8 to M5 from fuse to inverter
The batteries are currently connected to the inverter with 2x 8AWG cables lugged together with a thicker cable between the 2x batteries, but I couldn’t see a size there. I also found the manual for the Lobo inverter and that also mentions fusing the positive.
I think I just need to get my own cutter & crimper in the end.
There is a bit of an unspoken truth, which is that for really short runs you can get away with a thinner cable. The voltage drop, as well as the heat generated, depends on the resistance which in turn is directly proportional to the length of the cable. So it won’t matter if the interlink between the batteries isn’t the same size as the longer runs, as long as it is not obviously undersized (less than 16mm^2).
So if you already have an interlink between the batteries, and it doesn’t look obviously undersized, I’d keep it.
Thanks to @JacoDeJongh I am back up and running again and feeling a lot more confident about it this time around. It just took me a while to find some time to throw everything together, but I still have my trolley running the IVR-2400LBKS inverter. It’s just looking a lot bulkier now with the added battery balancer, fuse & BMV. I still need to do some drilling and cleaning up to mount it and run the cables properly. At least it’s up and running now with a better SoC indicator along with a more reasonable discharge floor.
When replacing the cables with the new cables I could actually make out some distinct burn marks on the old positive cables, so thank goodness for swapping them out for the bigger 25mm^2 cables and adding the fuse.
This is what you get when you want to go cheap and just want something to get you through load shedding while working on a laptop and 2 monitors, but then adding the TV onto it, moving to Johannesburg with 4 hour load shedding stints (luckily not anymore) and having more frequent load shedding on cheap equipment.
Oh well. We’re moving into our own place at the end of April and we should (hopefully) have some nice blue (and maybe also grey with a hint of red) equipment by the end of the year.
