solar power help?

[Edward Boyd]

Hi. New to this forum. I built the following system for our island off grid cottage:
two 300 watt CS panels and two 190 watt enerwatt panels running on 8 Ga parallel about 30 ft to a Tristar 45 Amp PWM controlling four 6 Volt Crown 220 ah LA batteries through a breaker box that runs a 2000 watt PS Inverter and DC 24 volt water pump and 24 volt Nova Kool 9000 fridge.

This week I noticed that the Tristar meter shows a max of 9.5 amps charging. I checked the output of the panels and they show 37 to 44 volts out.
The only thing I can figure is that the two 300 watt panel connection is shorted.
Any other ideas?
Besides upgrading to a 60 amp MPPT controller, what else should I be upgrading?
Thanks
Ed

[Rob Beckers]

Edward, welcome to the forum!

I'll need a bit more info: So, your system has a 24 Volt battery bank? Those 300W CS panels, are they 72-cell? The 190W Enerwatt panels, how many cells are those? 60-cell? Do you have all of them facing the same way, ie. same tilt-angle and orientation?

To test the panels, you can measure their open Voltage when they're not connected to anything. That would at least tell you if there's a short. You could also test their short-circuit current, but that's potentially risky unless you know what you're doing, as you cannot connect/disconnect connectors under load (it sparks, and those sparks punch little holes in the plating on the pins, causing them to corrode down the road, leading to premature failure).

-RoB-