Renogy DC-DC Battery Charger Review: "Smart" Alternator Charging for Solar Batteries!

hey guys today we're going to be testing in reviewing Rena G's 20 amp and 40 amp dc-to-dc battery charger and I've complained in a lot of my videos about how it's unsafe to use a standard vehicle alternator to charge a deeply discharged deep-cycle battery it's like an AGM or a lithium iron phosphate and you can actually damage your alternator or other parts of your vehicle's charging system but with this device you can safely charge your solar power batteries with a standard alternator it limits the current it also has temperature compensation and it also has smart charge profiles so that your battery will last a very long time it's actually a really simple unit to use on this side we have input you have positive and negative and then on this side we have output positive and negative so the input connects to the alternator or the starting battery and then the output connects to your solar battery or some kind of deep cycle battery and up close you have di P switches so you can change the charge profile parameters depending on which battery you use here is the temperature coefficient compensation sensor that you can buy separately and then you have these wire inputs the one on the left is for the ignition wire and so you connect that to an ignition circuit for your vehicle so that this will turn on only when your vehicle turns on and when your vehicle is off it will disconnect your batteries and the input terminal on the right is so that you can limit the current I still don't know why they actually have this also this is a 20 amp and they have a 40 amp and so depending on the size of your vehicle alternator will determine which one to use typically most people want to use the 40 amp but I would recommend people sticking with the 20 amp so that you don't hurt your batteries or your charging system at all it's better to stay on the safe side but if you have a really big truck or an RV this will totally work so now we're going to test this thing out and we have it connected to my RVs alternator at the input with a watt meter and then the output goes to these batteries in a load and then we also have this extra wire going to the D positive terminal and this will turn it on this is supposed to go the ignition circuit of your vehicle but because this is a test I'm just going to attach it to the positive terminal of the battery now we have fourteen point three volts coming from the alternator and twelve point five volts coming from the batteries so now we're going to connect the ignition circuit wire to D positive we see how fast it charges right now they're disconnected and now a green light turned on and we have 160 watts going in and 138 watts going out okay this one looks pretty confusing but it's not we have a battle born to a watt meter to the charger to a watt meter to a load and a discharged lithium iron phosphate Prisma XL battery and right now we have 201 watts going in and 174 watts going out of the 40 amp controller all right now we're gonna load test it I have a huge inverter connected to this one with a heat gun and we are gonna turn it on and see how many amps we can push through it oh man I just blew the freakin fuse on this thing we have to get another way to connect this battery to here cuz it's too much now we're going to bypass the fuse line and we'll see how much this thing can pump and we have 658 watts going in and 519 watts going out it's producing 40 amps at 12 point 7 volts so this works as advertised isn't this cool it actually works it's amazing oh my god 700 Watts going in but we still have 40 amps going out it's amazing I hope you guys like that test that was super cool so in that last test when the fuse blew I thought that it broke and I was so bummed because I thought I couldn't recommend it to you guys but this thing is awesome like right when it hit 40 amps it stayed there so far I really like it and I can totally recommend it especially with Renault G's warranty policy but I'm gonna be testing this for the next couple months with my new system to see if it works as advertised now let's talk about things that I dislike about it I think that it should be a voltage sensitive system so when the alternator turns on on the input side it should be able to register that through voltage alone without this ignition circuit but you need this ignition circuit to turn it on the next downside is it doesn't come with a temperature sensor and I would imagine that it would come with it considering it's so cheap but you have to buy it separate and that's kind of lame but if you're using it for a lithium battery you do not need the temp sensor I also still have not figured out the low current mode it's only 12% so of 20 amps that is just so minimal I don't know who would be charging at such a low rate another downside is that the moment that this thing turns on with the ignition circuit it starts charging I wish there was a delay with most battery Isolators and marine external regulators on their alternators there will be a delay so that the alternator belts can warm up and everything will be ready and then you charge it's like with a generator you don't put big loads on it right when you start it up you need to heat it up a little bit and then put big loads on it this does not have that right when you turn it on with the ignition circuit this starts charging but overall this is probably the best thing on the market for the price there are other DC to DC battery chargers by like sterling they cost a lot more money so what you get for the price and something that actually works as advertised it's really great I hope you guys liked watching this video and I hope you learned a lot and I'll talk to you later bye

Channel: DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse

Views: 306,836

Keywords: off grid solar, will prowse, diy solar, rv solar, renogy dc dc battery charger review

Id: EcVjPap9dkY

Length: 5min 44sec (344 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2019