the karavan is designed to be self-sufficient. there are the water tanks, the diesel hot water, heating and cooking and most importantly the solar charged batteries. i have a suspicion that the solar charger originally used in the kk is , let’s say: not top shelf.

so i bought this one.

not only is this controller smarter, i.e. uses a number of different algorithms to determine the best spot on the charge curve, but it also has a built-in bluetooth interface.

that allows me to read out the current & historic status of the controller and most importantly the wattage supplied by the solar panels and the voltage & current supplied to the battery bank.

so let’s see what we can learn from this.

the next step is to move the solar controller from the boot to the multibox, right next to the batteries. that will make the connection to the batteries much shorter, hopefully resulting in less of a voltage drop and faster charging.