hi, this is josh with another episode of solartech tv. and today, we're gonna be looking at our ms4448magnum pae power center with a midnite classic 150 charge controller installed. by the end of this video, you should haveyour power center breakers turned on and have all the programming dialed in for charge timeand voltage.
Android TV box wholesale, let's take a look! before we jump into the programming, there'sa couple of things i want to go over as far as expectations. i'm assuming here that you've got all yourwiring correct and that you've double checked
all of your terminations. be thinkin' polarity here. if you've got all your wiring in place, thencome on and let's take a look over here. we're gonna get our midnite classic chargecontroller turned on first by turning on this right-hand cc number one mppt output breaker. that's gonna turn on our midnite classic. you should hear the fan blow, it will runthrough its boot up screen, and then ultimately, it's gonna require a little bit of programming. for our purposes here, we're gonna assumea crown cr430 flooded battery bank of 8 l16s
for 48 volts. and we're gonna assume a generator of 7 kilowattsat 240 volts. okay. the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonnaget into the main menu of the midnite classic by pressing main menu. and the first menu item that comes up hereis the charge menu. we'll just press the enter button betweenthe four arrows to get into the charge menu. and then the first thing that comes up inthe menu there is volts, and that's where we wanna be.
so we'll hit enter again. once we get in here, we'll see the defaultvalues in here for equalize, absorb, and float voltage set points. this is solar we're talkin' about here. and we're gonna need to adjust these numbersup. the manufacturers default these numbers tobe very low and in most cases they're going to need to be turned up, the charging voltageand the charging time. so i happen to know that the crown cr430swant to absorb charge at 58.0, they wanna equalize at 62.0, and they want to float at54.0.
which are kind of easy, convenient numbersto work with. so we'll get in here and adjust these valuesup and down here. we'll turn our eq up from the default to 62. and then we'll use the right arrow to toggleover to absorb, and turn it up to 58.0. and we're gonna turn our float to 54.0. now, on the midnite classic, the thing tokeep in mind is that after you've entered these values in, you've gotta get in and pressthis enter button and your controller will flash data sent and save to controller. that's how we know our values are saved inthere.
now we've got our voltages in here, once youverify they're correct with your battery manufacturer, don't use the ones i used if you're not usin'cr430s, once you're comfortable with these numbers we're gonna press the main menu buttonone time to back out of volts, and we're gonna use the right arrow to go over one click tocharge time. this is where our absorb and equalizationtimes are. we'll press enter to get into this menu. and here we have an absorb time of two hours. we're assuming an array size of 12 panelsthat are 60 cells and 260 watts a piece. so with 8 batteries, our absorb time is gonnashake out to be about three and a half hours.
that's what's gonna be required to get usto 100%. this default time of two hours isn't gonnaget us there. so we have to get in and adjust our absorbtime up to three hours, thirty minutes. now, be sure you visit the manual on this. i'm usin' this based on 8 l16 flooded batteriesand 12 260 watt panels in four strings of three. you gotta get in and look at the charge timesection of the manual for the controller to be sure you're doin' it right. okay, i've got three hours and thirty minutes.
here's a protip for you: you gotta make surethat your equalization is about one half to two thirds of what your absorb time is. and you kinda have to tweak it to figure outwhere it's gonna be perfect, but if we're gonna absorb for three hours and thirty minutes,we're gonna start with an equalization time of two hours. so we'll get two hours programmed in here. and we will hit enter. it will flash data set and save to controller. and that's all we need to do for the midniteclassic 150 charge controller.
it can do a lot, you guys. but the main thing we need to focus on hereis charging your batteries at the right voltage for the right amount of time, and that's whatwe're accomplishing here. once you've got it saved and you're comfortablewith the values that you've got, go ahead and press this status button on the lowerleft to get you back to the main screen. okay, now that we have the charge controllerprogrammed to charge at the right voltage and for the right amount of time, we can turnon the input breaker and let power in from the solar array. if you've got sun, your charge controllershould start charging batteries.
next we're gonna work on gettin' the inverterto come on and invert power to ac loads and get some programming taken care of in thisguy. so the first thing we're gonna wanna do withthe magnum inverter is turn on our main dc disconnect here, it's a 175 labelled "inverterdc disconnect." we're gonna kick this guy on, at this pointit should light up our magnum remote, and it should go through its boot procedure andtell you the revision of the firmware you're working with et cetera, and eventually it'sgonna get to a place where it asks you what time it is. fair enough, that's my first question wheni wake up.
we're gonna skip through what time it is,to get to a point where we can get in and start inverting power because realistically,we wanna make sure we can run loads with this guy. now you'll notice we turn on the breaker,and it still says "off," we're not off and running yet! we need to get in and press our inverter on/offbutton, actually get the inverter to start inverting. at this point, it'll start inverting, butit's in stand-by mode because we don't have any of our output breakers on to get ac toour loads.
as a result, you'll find this ac output surgesuppressor is gonna be blinking in time with this inverter. tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. that sound is what it does when it's searching. it's a totally normal feature of the magnuminverter lineup that allows it to save power. when this guy's searching, it only uses aboutfive watts an hour. if you disable this feature, it uses about35 watts an hour. so i suggest you let it tick when you're notrunnin' any loads. so, at this point what you're gonna wannado is get in and turn on your ac output breaker
to let ac power leave your power center andgo to your ac loads so we can make sure it's gonna come on and run loads. this breaker's labelled "inverter ac output,"not to be confused with "inverter bypass." you'll probably never turn this breaker on. when we turn on inverter ac output, we'regonna send ac power out to our loads and we should be able to get in and see the inverterswitched out of searching and into inverting. this blinking blue surge suppressor lighton the ac output side is also going to go steady when that happens. and at this point, we've got our charge controllercharging batteries, and we've got our inverter
inverting ac power to loads. now that we've got our inverter up and runningloads, what we're gonna wanna do is program the couple of things that need to be programmed. again, there's a lot of things that can beprogrammed and i encourage you to read the manual to find out what it's capable of doing. i'm gonna walk you through programming yourbattery monitor kit, which is installed in all of our power centers, and that tells youyour amp hours gained and removed, and gives you a state of charge percentage. it's gotta be accurate or it's not going togive you the correct answer.
if you lie to it, it will lie to you. so we're gonna program our battery monitorkit first. and what we'll do is we'll get in here andpress "setup," we're gonna use the select knob and rotate over to bmk setup, and pressin on the select knob here. the charge efficiency is set for auto, andi recommend you leave it there, but if you go one click clockwise with this select knob,you'll find the default amp hour capacity here is 400 amp hours. now, if we actually have 430 amp hours, andthis thing thinks we have 400 amp hours, it's gonna read 100% when we're really only at93%.
and that's not going to work. to adjust it, we're gonna press in on theselect knob and rotate up to 430 amp hours in our case where we're using crown cr430sas our example. now that we have it set for 430 amp hours,and the efficiency is set for auto, we're done programming the bmk. the magnum doesn't require you to save thesettings, all we need to do is now exit out of this menu by pressing the meter buttonto take us back to the main screen. with our bmk programmed properly and readingcorrectly, we can then move onto charging our battery bank with an ac input source likegrid or generator.
as i mentioned for our example, we're gonnause a 7,000 watt 120/240 ac generator for the ac input to our power center. we need to tell the magnum remote how bigour ac input source is in amps so it knows how much it can pull, and we also need toget in and tell it the battery voltage we wanna charge at and also the amount of time,just like for solar, but gettin' in there with those same kind of values for chargingup from our ac source. when we get in and we're looking at how toprogram the ac input amps on this thing, we need to consider the max continuous wattageoutput on our source. if we're sayin' it's a 7,000 watt 120/240generator, if 7,000 watts is your continuous
wattage output, divided by 240 volts is 29and change amps. so, we know the default in here's 30 amps. if you leave it there, it's gonna pull a littletoo hard, you'll hear it in the generator when it's running. so what we'll do is we'll get in with thatinformation, again, if you have a different sized generator, we'll divide the continuouswattage by the ac voltage and that'll give us an idea on where we need to set our acinput amps. we're gonna press setup. and we're gonna rotate this select knob tocharger setup, and the first thing that comes
up here is ac input amps and we see it setfor 30. what we're gonna do in this case per our example,is take and drop our ac input amps down to 28 amps. now we're gonna be able to pull the rightamount of ac power from the generator and not overload it. couple other things we need to verify now:we need to be charging at the right voltage, and we need to be charging for the right amountof time. this is also gonna be on the charger setupmenu, so we will continue over to battery type.
this is the next thing we're going to adjusthere. in our case, the cr430s are a flooded batteryand they match the flooded profile, which is the default battery type in the magnumremote. get into the manual there because there areseveral types: agm 1, agm 2, flooded, and custom, if this isn't gonna work for you. for our example, flooded is going to work. after battery type, we get into our absorbdone time. here we're gonna need to adjust some thingsas well. we're gonna make the same calculation withour ac generator as we did from solar to get
in and say, "well, if we have a 7,000 wattgenerator, and our charger can put 3,850 watts into the battery bank, and we have 430 amphours, our absorb time is gonna be right around three hours." again, pick through your manual, the magnummanual's got a lot of information on absorb time, be sure you visit that. we're gonna get in and adjust our absorb timeup from two hours to three hours based on our available charging capacity. and that should be about it. at this point, we know that our ac generatoris gonna be charging the battery bank at the
right voltage and for the right amount oftime as well. okay, now that we've got our magnum ac inputparameters programmed, the next thing we want to do is get in and turn the generator on. so for the sake of time, i'm just gonna walkyou through what will happen here. you're gonna turn your generator on, ac power'sgonna come in here, it's not gonna be inside the inverter yet, we have to turn on our acinput breaker. so we turn on our ac input breaker, if theunit sees the voltage coming in your charge light's gonna start blinking green. and it's gonna do that for about 10 or 15seconds.
and then it should go solid. what it's doin' there is qualifying the power. "hey, i see ac power here, should i let itin? well, what's the voltage? well, what's the frequency?" once it's qualified and this charge lightgoes solid, your display should move from saying inverting to charging and tell youhow many amps it's putting into the battery bank. you'll also notice that your ac input surgesuppressor should be lit up from the ac input
being live. okay, great work everyone. at this point, our charge controller shouldbe turned on, our inverter should be turned
on and inverting, and we will have all theprogramming in for charging voltages and times as well ask bmk programming and our ac inputamperage for the magnum. if you've got any questions or concerns, feelfree to give us a call. this is josh the tech guy, have a great day!
