TM-2030 Technical Manual

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batteries must reach the “float” condition as described in the “SC-2030 Solar Charge Controller User’s
Manual” section 6.5.
2. When the above occurs, the TriMetric then declares the battery “charged” by flashing the “charging” light and
resets the “Days since charged” to 0.
3.When the charging is completed, and the batteries start to discharge again the “Amp hours from full” display is
reset to 0.00, and Battery%Full is reset to 100%. This assumes that the “auto reset” is on—(Program P12), which
is always the case in Level L1 or L2. It may be turned off if desired in Level L3
4. As the battery discharges, the TriMetric “amp hours from full” gradually go negative at a rate depending on the
number of amps, and go positive when charging. For example if the batteries are discharging with “amps” =
minus 10.0, the "amp-hours from full" display gradually decreases by exactly 10.0 for every hour that goes by.
Similarly, when amps are positive 10 amps (charging) the "amp-hours from full" display gradually increases by
almost 10 amps for every hour. The "almost" has to do with "charge efficiency factor" which can be adjusted by
program P10. If the efficiency factor is set to 100%, the amp-hours will go up by exactly 10 per hour , however if
the efficiency factor is 94%, the "amp-hours from full" display goes up by only 94% of 10, or 9.4 amp-hours for
every hour. The purpose of this is to account for the fact that you don't get as many amp-hours out of the battery as
you put in, so that the TriMetric "amp-hours from full" display will give a reading of amp-hours which reasonably
closely estimates how many amp hours have been removed.
5. It was mentioned in step 1 above that filtered values of “volts” and “amps” are used to judge when the batteries
are charged. This means that before using these values they are filtered so as to be only very slowly responsive
versions of “volts” and “amps” are used, so that quick variations of voltage or current don’t give a false “charged”
signal. (They are filtered with a time constant of about 2.4 minutes.) These “filtered” versions can be viewed, if
desired, by putting the TriMetric in Operating Level L3 or L4—when viewing the “volts” or “amps” display you
will see the “filtered” version by holding down on the “RESET” button.
The “battery % full” reading of the TriMetric just puts the “amp hours from full” number in a different form,
which depends on the “amp hours “Capacity” number that has been programmed in to the TriMetric in program
number P3. When the battery is full and the “amp hours from full” value is 0 then the Battery% full will be 100.
When the battery is depleted so that the “amp hours from full” goes to a negative value equal to the “capacity”
programmed in P3 then the Battery% full goes to zero.
6.3 What History data can tell you about your system See the chart on
the last page to see how to access and record this data. As explained in detail at the top of page 16:
There are 9 types of data recorded as “History” data. These are labeled H1 through H9.
1. Use program P7 to put meter in complexity level 2, 3 or 4.
1. Get to history data by holding “SELECT” down until you see H1.1 come into display.
2. Push SELECT button to advance to each of 9 types of data
3. For each data item, (except for item 1.1) push RESET to go back in time, up to 5 days, or 5 cycles.
`H1.1: “Battery Odometer”: Cumulative Lifetime Battery (discharging) Amp hours: Analogous to an odometer
in a car: Displays how many amp-hours you got from the battery system over its lifetime. This number starts at
0 when manually reset which would usually be at the time of initial installation of the batteries. To manually reset to
0: when this value shows in display hold the RESET button down for 5 seconds or so. Whenever the value of amps is
negative (charge is leaving the battery) the display counts "amp-hours" down. It does not record when battery is
charging (amps is positive). It is analogous to a car odometer—rather than miles travelled it shows how much total
energy the batteries have delivered.
Evaluate performance of the batteries and the level of care which they received. In case of power interruption to
the meter you will only lose a maximum of 3 hours of this data--because this data is automatically stored to
non volatile memory every 3 hours. This number can be displayed to -999,000 amp hours, which is longer
than most battery sets would be expected to last. If it approaches this, you should record the value and
manually reset it--since it does not just roll over to zero by itself after 999,999.)
Often battery life of "deep cycle" batteries is rated by the number of discharge cycles they will undergo without
failure--however this usually assumes a fairly complete discharge during each cycle, followed by complete
recharge. The life of deep cycle batteries is increased if the discharge depth is less--in fact the number of
cycles of life is inversely related to the depth of discharge of each cycle--so if you discharge only half the
amount during each "cycle" the battery typically will last about twice as many cycles.
When buying batteries you have a choice whether to double the number of batteries in your battery set—which
will reduce the average cycle depth of discharge to one-half, which should approximately double their number
of cycles. If the number of cycles did actually double there would be no cost benefit since twice the battery size