Charge two batteries with DUO Charge controller, but only use 1 for the connected load?

Hi,

I have two seperate battery banks.

Battery Bank 1 has it's only dedicated Solar panels and Victron solar controller - however the panels don't create enough power to maintain a FLOAT, the graphs show BULK most of the day as their is a high powered load connected 24/7

Battery Bank 2 has its own dedicated Solar panels and Victron solar controller - however the panels create too much power showing FLOAT most of the day. their is a low powered load connected 24/7

The panels are different wattages for each bank so i can't just switch over.

Essentially I want to use the spare PV from Battery Bank 2 to Charge the batteries in Battery Bank 1. In the hope it charges the Batterys in Bank 1 using the additional excess from Bank 2 PV

So i bought a Victronm Duo controller and connected it to the Bank2 PVs. The two outputs from the DUO go to battery bank 1 and 2. My hope being it would charge Bank 2 first and then use any remaining PV to charge Bank 1 batteries, but this doesn;t seem to be working. I have the low powered load connected to the DUO COntroller Load output 24/7 and i think it's using both Battery Banks to power it, so now Bank 1 has less charge remaining.

Is it possible to use the DUO to charge both batteries, but ONLY use Battery Bank 2 to charge the DUO Load? Therefore Bank 1 is only connected to get the extra charge from the Bank 2 PVs...?

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chrigu commented · Aug 31 at 08:12 AM

Are you using this?

https://www.victronenergy.com/solar-charge-controllers/bluesolar-pwm-charge-controller-lcd-usb

Its manual states that you can choose the current ratio between bank 1 and 2. Factory default is 50%. Once a bank is detected full, more current will go to the other bank. So you could set the ratio to 20/80 with most going into bank 2

Which solar charge controllers have you used before?

Charging from one battery to another sounds like a job for an Orion

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