Edd, I have had very good luck (now running on 5-6 years) with the Morningstar SunGuard Solar Charge controller, first with a 20 watt and now with a 40-50 watt solar panel. They are relatively cheap, available through Amazon (and other places), and is very simple to set up and use. If it is to charge only a single battery or bank, one controller works fine. I use one solar panel to charge both the house and the starting battery, and then you need two controllers, but both can be connected to the one solar panel. The least expensive controllers don’t use pulse width modulation to control the charge rate, and you definitely want to taper the charge as you approach full charge and barely charge at all went up to the full voltage (about 14.4V).
It does matter what type of battery you are charging. The SunGuard does only wet cells (standard car-type batteries) whereas the gel-type batteries need a somewhat different charging schedule. Morningstar makes all kinds - so take a look at their web page to see the differences. One strong point of Morningstar is their excellent tech support and on-line explanations and diagrams for how to do everything. Recently I had very complete helpful tech input from Noah Sindermann there; he responded to my emails within a day and figured out the problem and how to fix it (using two controllers driven by the same solar panel, you need blocking diodes on their inputs). Eric Cat's Paw C&C 35 Mk II Mattapoisett, MA > Listers, > > I?m looking for a decent charge controller for my 15W solar panel running to > my house bank. There seems to be so many choices out there landing from a few > bucks to over $60. > > Edd Schillay
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