Brat in business

[zoneblue]

Seeing as im doing a full time stint in the motorhome its time to study this little guy more closely.
I have it connected to the single 300W 72 cell monoC on the roof, and a 24V bank. Heres what i noticed so far.

1. For a simple controller its my view that i should be able to connect this up without the manual. In particular, its not clear which is 12/24V switch setting. The two battery switches also require a trip to the manual. Theres a heap of space inside the unit for more info.

2. The terminal block, same as the classic, id prefer something more robust. Getting any kind of torque on those screws flexs the PCB. There are three negative terminals, as far as i can tell, in common negative configuration.

3. After switch on theres a brief potentially distressing moment of silence. A person likes to know right off that they have wired the thing up right.

4. After a local app connected classic the information void is pretty stark. However the leds work pretty good, orange is bulk, orange flashing is absorb (2hr fixed), and green is float. Sleep, no leds...

5. Running in PWM the thing has a bit of a buzz going on, inaudible at 4 feet away, but you can hear it standing next to it. At a guess around the 500-1000Hz ballpark. Im kinda curious what there is inside a PWM controller to actually vibrate.

6. The idle tare: 14mA at 26V, 0.36W. Was hoping for better. For 2/3 of the day a charge controller sits there doing absolutely nothing. Lets get those tares down guys. On the motorhome, the battery is small, and all the various tares start to bite. Today i went around and measured all the DC converters i possess, and was horrified at what i found. A car style 5V USB converter can idle at as much as 1.5W. And yet i found equivalent units that clocked as low as 0.1W. Where there is a will there is a way.

7. Feature request: maybe a small oled display: Battery voltage, charge Watts, load watts. May as well make that 0.36W actually do something, right?

[brad.midnite]

That idle tare looks too high to me. The Brat enters a low power state 1 minute after charging stops (and load is off). It cannot drive the power semiconductors in this mode and so a timer was used to avoid rapid cycling between modes, if say, a child sits there and plays with the test load button.