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My solar charge controller is showing float and that my lithium 300ah battery is at 14.6 volts but my victron 712 battery monitor is showing 13.14 volts. I just setup this entire system and I’m not sure why the charge controller is entering this float when the battery is not fully charged.
Charge controller is victron 150/70
I also would like to know the appropriate settings for bulk/absorption, equalization if possible
(700 watts of solar on the roof)
It‘s hard to answer this question without further details. You should probably comment on your cables / wire sizes and the situation this has happened in.
The most obvious answer would be a „voltage drop“ caused by the resistance of a contact point, connector or cable. 700W@12V are already nearly 60A …
The wire from my bus bar to the batteries and the bus bar to my 2000 watt inverter be 4/0 gauge wire. could that be restricting it? All of the other wire between the solar and the controller and the controller to the bus bars are using 10 gauge wire. Lastly I did add a battle born 12volt battery heating pad straight to the positive and negative bus bars. It goes from the bus bar to a thermometer and then the heating pad so it only turns on when the meter reads below freezing. Could any of this be the reason my charge controller is showing much higher voltage then my battery monitor?
Solar cable: 700W@35V -> 20A -> 10 gauge [0.67V/m] is fine - b.t.w. are your panels in series or in parallel?
charge controller: 700W@12V -> 58A -> 10 gauge [0.2V/m] is critical. My suggestion would be 6 gauge …
It‘s hard to tell if the voltage drop by your cables - please be aware that every connector/connection point will cause additional voltage drop - is the only reason for your problem. But from my point of view it is at least an essential part of it.
A 2m distance (-> 4m cable + connections) between battery-bar and charge controller should be sufficient to create your voltage difference of 1.4V (at full sun / 700W PV power).
Have you an Venus / Cerbo / … gateway installed? If the voltage drop is really the reason you should see a correlation between solar strength / power of your PV and the voltage-difference between charger and battery monitor.
At night the voltage between charger and battery monitor should be nearly identical. At sunny days the voltage difference should be maximal.
The voltage is very similar when its night time.
The wire gauge 10 is causing your problems and should be changed to - at least - gauge 6 (like mentioned yesterday).
Doing so should greatly reduce your problem.
You'll have to read it on the fuse.
The fuses are not the problem - otherwise the voltage difference should be indipendent from sunlight / charging current.
The reason is the insufficient cable and therefore resulting voltage drop between MPPT and bus-bar (see comments above).
An exchange to gauge 6 wire (or better) should solve the problem.
