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Sean Hamstra avatar image
Sean Hamstra asked

Safe to allow solar to power RV 12v loads while battery off?

I asked ChatGPT for fun but no idea if it’s right… ;). Time for the experts! Simple question I believe, thanks for any help. I have a Victron 100/30


Remember when we talked about rv battery and solar? So let’s say a system has the solar hooked thru mppt and that connects to the same positive bus bar as the battery and all 12v appliances. There is a shutoff between the battery and this bus bar.


Now let’s say the shutoff is off but solar is still coming in and that feeds the 12v appliances. Is that ok? Any issue if solar drops causing fluctuations or does the mppt handle that? For example, lights burning out or pumps failing since the power flow isn’t necessarily stable.


Should the MPPT be hooked directly to the battery instead of the shared bus bar? I do have a separate shutoff for the solar btw.

battery chargingMPPT SmartSolar
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nickdb avatar image
nickdb answered ·

From the manual:

9.8.1. Unable to operate as a power supply

We do not recommend to use the solar charger as a power supply, that is without batteries connected.

Operation as a power supply will not damage the solar charger, but it is not guaranteed that the solar charger is able to run all types of loads. Some type of loads might run, others might not. Especially at low load power, the solar charger is too slow to keep the voltage constant. As such, we do not provide support in these kind of situations.

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Sean Hamstra avatar image Sean Hamstra commented ·
Thanks for clarifying this for me! Makes total sense.
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