Fridge and Batts... It's a Done Deal

We finally got our batteries and fridge straightened out... For the batteries, we went with real golf cart batteries this time, got them from Sam's Club, these are Energizer CG2, they are 6 volt batteries so I bought 4 of them, had to hook up 2 pair to make 12 volts, each battery is 220 amp hours, so now we have 440 amp hours to use. They are deep cycle batteries, true deep cycle, not hybrids like I had been buying before.

In the image above, you can see the 4 batteries, they aren't hooked up to anything there, you can also see the metal tray they are sitting in, that is in case of a leak, and in the upper left, the green thing, that's the Xantrex C35 charge controller, I have the front removed to expose the innards, I needed to change the float and bulk settings on the unit to work with the new batteries.

The biggest drawback to this particular type of battery is the posts on them are small, they were designed to be used in golf carts, so they didn't need a large post to hook up multiple things, but we managed OK. They charge fully each day and have gone through a couple of days of clouds without running out of power.

We hooked up the batteries and allowed them to do their thing for a few days before we plugged in the freezer-fridge conversion, I wanted to make 100% sure my inverter wasn't being a problem, it had been shutting down and the fault light coming on, turns out it was because of the dying batteries we had it hooked up to.

Now we have the new fridge hooked up and it's working great, that fridge is a bit smaller than our old one, not that big a deal, but the baskets I had for the previous one are too big, I can use the smaller basket, just barely, fortunately that freezer unit was still very new and it still had the wire basket that comes with them from the store, that has been a MAJOR help.

We use an external thermostat to convert a chest freezer into a refrigerator, you can learn more about that process here: http://wretha.blogspot.com/2013/02/freezer-fridge-conversion.html

The graphic below is the way we have the batteries hooked up in series and parallel, click on the image to see it full size.

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Wretha,

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