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jeff cote here with voting tech talk

so what we're talking about next is one

of my favorite products

a solar controller why jeff do i need a

solar controller

well you only need a solar controller if

you have solar panels

but solar panels obviously

need a controller or a pwm controller or

an nppt controller

to regulate the energy coming from the

sun because think about it this way

your batteries might be full at one

given moment in the daytime when the sun

is fully shining

and if your batteries are completely

completely full how do you

make sure that your solar panel is not

over charging

the batteries well the job of

controlling

and basically making sure that your

batteries are getting exactly the

voltage they need

right and going through the three phases

of charging

bulk absorption and then float

you do that with a controller and so

victron is a amazing company

has tons of different products and one

of the products that we use

commonly are their lines of controllers

and the most popular controller that we

both sell and install is the 7515

so 75 means maximum voltage coming into

the unit is 75 volts

and maximum amperage going through the

controller

is 15 amps so effectively it's a 75 15.

so when you're sizing a controller and a

controller like this you always want to

make sure that your array

is sized and well within the operating

range

so that you don't exceed the

specifications of this controller

this controller comes in two flavors

there's sort of

what's called the blue solar or the

smart solar and right now we're going to

be talking about the smart solar 7515.

you can see the product is uh and again

victron does a good job with packaging

so you can actually see the controller

itself

right through the box um it shows you a

little bit at the back

sort of the different things that it

does now remember this product is not

just for the marine world so there are

certain

aspects of this product that many of us

in the boarding world would not

take advantage of because it's just not

applicable to us

so the what smart solar means in this

instance is that

if you've downloaded from the app store

uh

the victron app you can actually

remotely log in

now remotely doesn't mean far away but

somewhere on your boat

you can have an iphone and you're going

to bluetooth to this device and you can

actually see the data

not only in real time but also historic

data

from the controller which is great for

figuring out how much is your solar wave

outputting

what amperage you're getting out of it

what has it been doing over time

and it gets better victron also

thank god has allowed us to

customize and configure these

controllers

for some of us that are geeks for

exactly what a battery needs

so you can actually i can go into this

controller and i you know

some of you know this i'm a big fan of

firefly batteries and i can actually go

in there and actually do a custom charge

profile

to me exactly what the manufacturer

wants so i can literally give the

battery exactly what it wants and i can

configure it via a custom charge profile

naturally they give you sort of preset

choices and you can do that too

and you can do all of that via the app

so it means that basically when you're

looking at this hardware you don't need

an interface it doesn't need to be

larger than it is because you're

actually interfacing the unit for both

information

and programming over bluetooth

now you can't go over bluetooth from

your home or down the dock

this is a local area network right

but it's really handy because these

controllers might be down in the engine

room maybe at the

in the aft of the boat and so what we're

gonna do next is we're gonna open this

little box by the way we've sold

thousands upon thousands of these

controllers

and i've never seen a 7515 fail in the

field

never so that's a pretty big endorsement

good job

on the team that built it and on the

hardware so

the back of this uh sort of uh box

there's a little sort of i guess maybe a

security tab to know that if

the box has ever been opened and that's

what i'm sort of fiddling with right now

you can see it's just at the back here

so i'm just slowly but surely going

and i don't want to damage anything so

i'm trying to cut this and my dexterity

is not what it used to be

i used to be way better when i was doing

tools now i just type on a keyboard

and then talk so it's my life is a

little bit easier now

so uh what we're going to do is we're

going to open this nice and slowly

all right excellent again it's it's a

piece of electronic right this is not a

dumb device

it's a little computer in there so

handle with care

all right so we're going to open this up

and you can see i'm putting my hand

on the display i don't want it to flop

out right so here's the box

and this is the controller so what you

do in this situation again what i

normally do or tell my technicians put

your hand

on the front drop it like this take the

plastic box out and you get you can see

there's a lot of

space around the box in case the

packaging would get

damaged on the outside so they're giving

room so the package is a little bit

bigger than we need

but that's a good thing because we're we

don't want to damage this device

so here's the look of the controller

look at it from the front it's

relatively not that big you know

sometimes i describe it as

basically a pack of cigarettes but

double the thickness

right look at the width some boats you

know have 10

15 of those some boats have one um it

all depends

and notice the connections right from

the front right here

right underneath that's where the wires

are going to be actually interconnecting

you notice there's actually three sets

or three pairs right

so one is battery then next is the solar

array

and then after that is the load most of

us in our boats

will not be installing the load that's

for a different type of application

remember this controller is not just for

the marine field it works in the marine

field but it also works in different

applications

most of us as boaters are going to be

interconnecting the battery

to those the first two then the solar

array oh by the way

never screw up the polarity right so if

you're going to connect a

positive on a negative and a negative on

a positive you're going to be in big

trouble

so never ever ever confuse the polarity

or reverse the polarity on your solar

panel to this controller

like i i tell my text make sure you

measure

voltage and confirm that positive is

positive and negative is negative

and a way to do that by the way is just

taking a multimeter and if you see

positive voltage from the solar panel

while it's in the sun

not connected then you know you're at

the right polarity if it's a negative

voltage you know that your leads

are opposite what they should be and so

that you have it

reverse okay another cool thing here is

you can actually see there's

actually a little fuse here so the

controller has a built-in fuse

from the controller to the panel and

when you're going to be installing this

controller on your boat you're also

going to need to have a fuse

from the battery all the way to this

device

so this has already a fuse from here to

the panel and you'll still

be running a duplex wire from the

battery

up to the controller there's these

little

set screws right here so you need sort

of like a jewelry type of screwdriver

to be able to tighten those and then

what happens is you can see the wires go

in here

you definitely want to make sure when

you're installing a solar controller

that

no wires ever sort of are flaring out

and touching one another that could be

really bad

so when you're actually doing this you

need to see what you're doing

and having 99 percent of the wires in

and one percent out even one strand

it's not even 99 percent it'd be like 1

000th

that's too much you all the strands have

to go in and you make sure that it's

absolutely clean because those two

strands

can never ever touch so that's the

tedious part of putting a controller

you've got to do it remember with

electricity there is no room for error

it's perfection or perfection and if you

don't have perfection

then you're going to have a lot of

problems and you don't want problems

with your boat there's enough going on

in the water

to worry about electrical issues the

controller is relatively light like i

said

you can configure it for agm settings

flood to lead asset settings

lithium you can monitor it there's even

a little port

right here and you see that little tab

it's called the ve bus

v-net victron energy so you can do that

that's pretty cool

and uh what i like about it probably my

favorite thing is how reliable it is

because reliability is everything

and then everything else is sort of

add-ons right

benefits and the other one is bluetooth

the fact that it's bluetooth

is huge uh people are always curious i

wonder what my solar array is doing

am i outputting as much as i thought i

wanted is my solar panel in the right

location

how does shading affect my solar panel

if you're geeky and you're curious and

curious

is a good thing we were all curious when

we were kids it's good to be curious

even on if we have a boat

you can answer all those questions by

just logging in via your app to this

device

and you do that locally via bluetooth so

this is one of my favorite devices from

victron it's a

victron 7515 mppt

controller and we sell

like i said thousands every year it's a

great device and it's reliable

and thanks for watching

thanks for watching this video and we'll see you on

the next video