A few months ago I start playing around with solar power, I plan to install 2 IPcamera with a router in a remote part of our farm, I bought the cheap generic blue PWM solar controller, 50watts(18v) solar panel and 2 17ah lead acid batteries. But it's conking out in the night and found out that the solar panel is not enough to full tank the batteries to make it through the night, went to decide what to get, a cheaper route of a more efficient solar controller MPPT to get more juice on the solar panel or just add another solar panel so there will be plenty enough of power going into the batteries and the load(camera/router), so I went to buy a cheap MPPT solar controller, which is the popular one, the CPY-2410 by UEIUA, this is before I actually watched a 2nd popular review in the youtube about this product. It's suppose to be the cheapest yet working real MPPT solar controller you can get... not until after the 2nd revision(rev2) which supposedly they swapped the board from a different not so good model.
I used to like this controller, it has a robust plastic body and a heat sink in the back dissipates the heat properly, I also observed it consumes less power than my other blue PWM solar controller, as it only eats .04 battery volts per hour during the night with load(2camera+router) connected, compared to the blue PWM about .05 battery volts per hour with the same load. It also supposedly can maximize my 18v solar panel and convert it to amperes, both feeding the batteries and load.
Not until I noticed it peaking at 15.4v, it needs to be tested as it will be deployed unsupervised in a farm in the middle of nowhere.
I tested it for days and used a cheap volt amp meters, the cheap volt amp meter may be a little inaccurate with an error of +/-.2v but it will do the job knowing the flow of the system, its not worth to buy expensive ones just for this test, rather just use the money to buy a better controller.
Anyway you can watch a video from here how the controller behaves.
Even though it works fine for it's price, the controller seems to be unpredictable and inconsistent that maybe bad for unsupervised deployment as seen in the video. One day it peak a very high voltage of 15.4v the next day under voltage occurs that under charged the batteries. It just pumps in voltage then disconnects when it is reaching 15v, it just cycle like that so i doubt it's capable of float charging or equalization, not having a control console, there is no way to customize the voltage of the unit, nor identify if you are plugging a gel battery that is more sensitive to higher charging voltage.
That 15.4v could damage my 12v devices, though it may tolerate higher voltages, it could shorten their circuits life span faster especially it is running 24/7 non-stop.
I've added a DC voltage regulator at the load out connection so it will feed my devices a stable 12v even if the controller peaked by 15v but that additional regulator added the cost and power consumption a little bit, it also added a layer of circuit bureaucracy which may fail thus shutting down the camera and router rendering the project useless. To add that the controller is 3x the price of the cheaper blue PWM solar controller I used.
I am leaning on using this controller maybe to justify my purchase on it and seeing its internal like having a lot of capacitor and inductor makes it look more of a superior product, but after some testing I may skip it. I ended up using the blue PWM solar controller for my deployment project.
But not is all lost, I tried to use the CPY-2410 solar controller as a Battery Charger and a DC uninterrupted power supply for a router, you can check out my article regarding it.
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