One panel array, multiple charger / batteries

Q&A and troubleshooting
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1

I’m looking at setting up a system for charging batteries for a whole lot of regional art pieces at an event.

We will provide the panels and (Smart Solar) chargers.

Artists bring their own batteries. Artist rotate batteries in to a bay as needed for a charge.

I understand I could build this as a group of individual stand alone panels with a charger.

Downside of this arrangement as there will be periods where some batteries are charged and that PV energy isn’t helping anyone.

I’ve searched a bit and can’t see if it’s possible to have one large PV array with multiple chargers feeding multiple, different batteries.

I can see the limitation in that when PV energy falls below the combined max current draw of all the chargers there’s no obvious way of balancing this.

Only alternate I came up with is having an isolator switch between adjacent pods allowing an operator to join panel sections (when one of the bays is empty) putting max PV power on the ‘bus’.

Interested to hear your thoughts…

2

Use the pv with one inverter/charger and a large batttery bank. Provide 230v for each stall, the customers can use their own batteries and chargers.

3

Would be helpful to know if all the batteries were the same voltage? I am assuming 12v batteries in this idea
I would have a system outputting mains voltage and dedicated mains chargers. It wouldn’t have to be a huge system, maybe a 1.6kVa or 3kVa.

Then use a few ip22 or an ip43.

If you hotswap on a bus bar you may run into issues like some batteries discharging into others.

4

To clarify :

I expect all the batteries to be of the same voltage (12v). Definitely different capacities. Maybe different chemistries.

The “bus” concept is on the PV supply side - i.e. a breaker connects the PV from the vacant pod next to it doubling the available power to the MPPT.