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jeff cote here with voting tech talk
so what we're talking about next is one
of my favorite products
a solar controller why jeff do i need a
solar controller
well you only need a solar controller if
you have solar panels
but solar panels obviously
need a controller or a pwm controller or
an nppt controller
to regulate the energy coming from the
sun because think about it this way
your batteries might be full at one
given moment in the daytime when the sun
is fully shining
and if your batteries are completely
completely full how do you
make sure that your solar panel is not
over charging
the batteries well the job of
controlling
and basically making sure that your
batteries are getting exactly the
voltage they need
right and going through the three phases
of charging
bulk absorption and then float
you do that with a controller and so
victron is a amazing company
has tons of different products and one
of the products that we use
commonly are their lines of controllers
and the most popular controller that we
both sell and install is the 7515
so 75 means maximum voltage coming into
the unit is 75 volts
and maximum amperage going through the
controller
is 15 amps so effectively it's a 75 15.
so when you're sizing a controller and a
controller like this you always want to
make sure that your array
is sized and well within the operating
range
so that you don't exceed the
specifications of this controller
this controller comes in two flavors
there's sort of
what's called the blue solar or the
smart solar and right now we're going to
be talking about the smart solar 7515.
you can see the product is uh and again
victron does a good job with packaging
so you can actually see the controller
itself
right through the box um it shows you a
little bit at the back
sort of the different things that it
does now remember this product is not
just for the marine world so there are
certain
aspects of this product that many of us
in the boarding world would not
take advantage of because it's just not
applicable to us
so the what smart solar means in this
instance is that
if you've downloaded from the app store
uh
the victron app you can actually
remotely log in
now remotely doesn't mean far away but
somewhere on your boat
you can have an iphone and you're going
to bluetooth to this device and you can
actually see the data
not only in real time but also historic
data
from the controller which is great for
figuring out how much is your solar wave
outputting
what amperage you're getting out of it
what has it been doing over time
and it gets better victron also
thank god has allowed us to
customize and configure these
controllers
for some of us that are geeks for
exactly what a battery needs
so you can actually i can go into this
controller and i you know
some of you know this i'm a big fan of
firefly batteries and i can actually go
in there and actually do a custom charge
profile
to me exactly what the manufacturer
wants so i can literally give the
battery exactly what it wants and i can
configure it via a custom charge profile
naturally they give you sort of preset
choices and you can do that too
and you can do all of that via the app
so it means that basically when you're
looking at this hardware you don't need
an interface it doesn't need to be
larger than it is because you're
actually interfacing the unit for both
information
and programming over bluetooth
now you can't go over bluetooth from
your home or down the dock
this is a local area network right
but it's really handy because these
controllers might be down in the engine
room maybe at the
in the aft of the boat and so what we're
gonna do next is we're gonna open this
little box by the way we've sold
thousands upon thousands of these
controllers
and i've never seen a 7515 fail in the
field
never so that's a pretty big endorsement
good job
on the team that built it and on the
hardware so
the back of this uh sort of uh box
there's a little sort of i guess maybe a
security tab to know that if
the box has ever been opened and that's
what i'm sort of fiddling with right now
you can see it's just at the back here
so i'm just slowly but surely going
and i don't want to damage anything so
i'm trying to cut this and my dexterity
is not what it used to be
i used to be way better when i was doing
tools now i just type on a keyboard
and then talk so it's my life is a
little bit easier now
so uh what we're going to do is we're
going to open this nice and slowly
all right excellent again it's it's a
piece of electronic right this is not a
dumb device
it's a little computer in there so
handle with care
all right so we're going to open this up
and you can see i'm putting my hand
on the display i don't want it to flop
out right so here's the box
and this is the controller so what you
do in this situation again what i
normally do or tell my technicians put
your hand
on the front drop it like this take the
plastic box out and you get you can see
there's a lot of
space around the box in case the
packaging would get
damaged on the outside so they're giving
room so the package is a little bit
bigger than we need
but that's a good thing because we're we
don't want to damage this device
so here's the look of the controller
look at it from the front it's
relatively not that big you know
sometimes i describe it as
basically a pack of cigarettes but
double the thickness
right look at the width some boats you
know have 10
15 of those some boats have one um it
all depends
and notice the connections right from
the front right here
right underneath that's where the wires
are going to be actually interconnecting
you notice there's actually three sets
or three pairs right
so one is battery then next is the solar
array
and then after that is the load most of
us in our boats
will not be installing the load that's
for a different type of application
remember this controller is not just for
the marine field it works in the marine
field but it also works in different
applications
most of us as boaters are going to be
interconnecting the battery
to those the first two then the solar
array oh by the way
never screw up the polarity right so if
you're going to connect a
positive on a negative and a negative on
a positive you're going to be in big
trouble
so never ever ever confuse the polarity
or reverse the polarity on your solar
panel to this controller
like i i tell my text make sure you
measure
voltage and confirm that positive is
positive and negative is negative
and a way to do that by the way is just
taking a multimeter and if you see
positive voltage from the solar panel
while it's in the sun
not connected then you know you're at
the right polarity if it's a negative
voltage you know that your leads
are opposite what they should be and so
that you have it
reverse okay another cool thing here is
you can actually see there's
actually a little fuse here so the
controller has a built-in fuse
from the controller to the panel and
when you're going to be installing this
controller on your boat you're also
going to need to have a fuse
from the battery all the way to this
device
so this has already a fuse from here to
the panel and you'll still
be running a duplex wire from the
battery
up to the controller there's these
little
set screws right here so you need sort
of like a jewelry type of screwdriver
to be able to tighten those and then
what happens is you can see the wires go
in here
you definitely want to make sure when
you're installing a solar controller
that
no wires ever sort of are flaring out
and touching one another that could be
really bad
so when you're actually doing this you
need to see what you're doing
and having 99 percent of the wires in
and one percent out even one strand
it's not even 99 percent it'd be like 1
000th
that's too much you all the strands have
to go in and you make sure that it's
absolutely clean because those two
strands
can never ever touch so that's the
tedious part of putting a controller
you've got to do it remember with
electricity there is no room for error
it's perfection or perfection and if you
don't have perfection
then you're going to have a lot of
problems and you don't want problems
with your boat there's enough going on
in the water
to worry about electrical issues the
controller is relatively light like i
said
you can configure it for agm settings
flood to lead asset settings
lithium you can monitor it there's even
a little port
right here and you see that little tab
it's called the ve bus
v-net victron energy so you can do that
that's pretty cool
and uh what i like about it probably my
favorite thing is how reliable it is
because reliability is everything
and then everything else is sort of
add-ons right
benefits and the other one is bluetooth
the fact that it's bluetooth
is huge uh people are always curious i
wonder what my solar array is doing
am i outputting as much as i thought i
wanted is my solar panel in the right
location
how does shading affect my solar panel
if you're geeky and you're curious and
curious
is a good thing we were all curious when
we were kids it's good to be curious
even on if we have a boat
you can answer all those questions by
just logging in via your app to this
device
and you do that locally via bluetooth so
this is one of my favorite devices from
victron it's a
victron 7515 mppt
controller and we sell
like i said thousands every year it's a
great device and it's reliable
and thanks for watching
thanks for watching this video and we'll see you on
the next video