Talking to a mate the other day he has a anderson plug on the draw bar of his Van that is for a unregulated solar panel input Van has a solar regulator , he asked me if he could or what would happen if he connected the anderson plug from the the cars battery , alternator to that anderson plug . I said I have no idea and have never even thought of doing that ,
Since the alternator would be around 100A output and the solar controller would have a capability of 20-40A max, the smoke would probably come out of the regulator.
Connecting the alternator directly to the van battery would be fine. Cheers, Peter
-- Edited by Peter_n_Margaret on Wednesday 7th of February 2024 03:03:05 PM
I tried this once, for reasons that I'd rather not admit to. Not an accident - it was intentional. It didn't work. Reason being that the Enerdrive DC2DC in the van had two inputs, one coming from the vahicle's alternator and one from an unregulated solar panel. The DC2DC is configured to expect around 12-13V from the alternator and over 14.5V (I forget the exact number) from the solar panel. If it only sees 12-13V on the solar input, it seems to assume a faulty solar pael and throws an eror. I didn't damage anything, but not long after I had to disconnect the DC2DC from the van battery and reconnect it on order to reboot the DC2DC. It's still working.
